雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第7章:運轉起來(13)
These meetings were an opportunity for Alan to develop the ideas for chess-playing machines that had begun in his 1941 discussion with Jack Good.
They often talked about the mechanisation of thought processes, bringing in the theory of probability and weight of evidence, with which Donald Michie was by now familiar.
他們經常討論思維過程的機械化，引出了概率論和證據權重的理論，唐納德·米奇已經很熟悉這些理論了。The development of machines for cryptanalytic work had in any case stimulated discussion as to mathematical problems that could be solved with the mechanical aid—that of finding large prime numbers, for instance, was a topic that came up in lunchtime conversations, rather to the amazement of Flowers, the electronic engineer, who could see no point in it.
密碼分析機器的發展，刺激了關於用機器解決數學問題的討論，比如他們在午餐時討論的尋找大素數的問題，就讓電子工程師弗洛文斯很驚奇，因爲他完全聽不懂。
But Alan's talk went in rather a different direction.
但是，艾倫的想法是朝着另一個方向，He was not so much concerned with the building of machines designed to carry out this or that complicated task.
他並不是很關心這種執行復雜任務的機器，He was now fascinated with the idea of a machine that could learn.
他關心的是一種可以自動學習的機器。It was a development of his suggestion in Computable Numbers that the states of a machine could be regarded as analogous to 'states of mind'.
這是他在《可計算數》中提到的想法：機器的狀態，可以看作思維的狀態。If this were so, if a machine could simulate a brain in the way he had discussed with Claude Shannon, then it would have to enjoy the faculty of brains, that of learning new tricks.
在這個基礎上，如果說機器可以通過他與克勞德·香農討論的方法來模擬大腦，那麼它就必須擁有大腦的學習新事物的能力。He was concerned to counter the objection that a machine, however intricate its task, would only be doing what a person had explicitly designed it to do.
艾倫正在考慮一個爭議：機器不管多麼複雜，都只能執行人們明確設計好的指令。In these off-duty discussions they spent a good deal of time on what would be said to count as 'learning'.
在這些閒暇討論中，他們花了許多時間來探討什麼是"學習"。
