雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第9章:退隱山林(42)
The broad insight, and the short-term skill, had little in common—that was one of Alan's problems.
This paper was something of a swan song for the primal urge, bequeathing the original excitement to the world before it was submerged in mundane technicalities.
但是這篇論文，在被低下的技術水平掩埋之前，已經把最原始的強烈願望傳達給了整個世界。As such it was a classic work in the British philosophical tradition.
這是英國哲學的經典傑作。
It was a gentle reproof to the ponderous essays by Norbert Wiener, as well as to the reactionary, 'soupy' trend of English culture in the late 1940s.
這是對維納的沉悶文風的反抗，也是對40年代陰鬱的英國文化的反抗。Bertrand Russell admired it, and his friend Rupert Crawshay-Williams wrote appreciatively to Alan of how much Russell and he had enjoyed reading it.
羅素非常欣賞這份傑作，他的朋友拉普特·克勞塞-威廉姆斯寫信給圖靈，表達了他本人和羅素有多麼喜歡這篇文章。From a philosophical point of view, it could be said to fit in with Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, which had appeared in 1949, and which put forward the idea of mind not as something added to the brain, but as a kind of description of the world.
從哲學的角度來看，這篇論文與吉爾伯特·賴爾的《思維的概念》有些吻合，這本書出版於1949年，其中提出思維並不是一種添加到大腦中的東西，而是一種對世界的描述。But Alan's paper proposed a specific kind of description, namely that of the discrete state machine.
圖靈則進一步提出了一種具體的描述，也就是離散狀態機。And he was more the scientist than the philosopher. The point of his approach, as he stressed in the paper, was not to talk about it in the abstract, but to try it out and see how much could be achieved.
相比於哲學家，圖靈首先是一位科學家，他的重點並不是抽象地談論，而是實踐的檢驗。In this he was the Galileo of a new science.
從這個角度來說，圖靈就是這門新科學的伽利略。Galileo made a practical start upon that abstract model of the world called physics; Alan Turing upon that model provided by the logical machine.
伽利略爲實體世界創造了一個抽象模型，也就是物理學，而圖靈創造的模型，就是邏輯機器。Alan himself would have liked the comparison: he made reference in the article to Galileo.
圖靈也會喜歡這樣的對比，他在這篇論文中，也提到了伽利略。A year or so later he gave a talk on this subject subtitled 'A Heretical Theory'.
大約在一年之後，他做了一場題爲《一個異端理論》的講話。
