雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第5章:解謎接力賽(13)

In 1935 the British had created Typex by adding certain attachments to it, while a few years earlier the German cryptographic authorities had modified it in a different way to create the machine which, though bearing the originAl name of Enigma, was much more effective than the commercially available device.

1935年，英國在它的基礎上進行了一些改造，創造了泰派克斯，而幾年前德國的密碼專家則用不同的路子進行了改造，雖然改造版的名字還叫謎機，但性能卻比商用版高出很多。

This did not mean that the German Enigma with which Alan Turing now had to grapple, was something ahead of its time, or even the best that the technology of the late 1930s could have produced

但這並不是說，艾倫·圖靈現在面對的德國謎機就是領先時代的，在30年代，它並不是最先進的。

The only feature of the Enigma that brought it into the twentieth century, or at least the late nineteenth, was that it was indeed 'electrical in operation'.

謎機唯一的20世紀新特性，或者說19世紀後期新特性，就是它是用電驅動的。

It used electrical wirings to perform automatically a series of alphabetical substitutions, as shown in the first figure.

它通過電路，自動執行一系列的字母替換（如下圖一）。

But an Enigma would be used in a fixed state only for enciphering one letter, and then the outermost rotor would move round by one place, creating a new set of connections between input and output, as shown in the second figure.

但是謎機的厲害在於，它在某個特定的狀態下，只替換一個字母，然後通過外部的轉盤，切換到一個新的狀態。每種狀態下，輸入與輸出之間的對應關係都是不同的（如第二圖所示）。

The Basic Enigma

原型版謎機

For the sake of simplicity, the diagram has been drawn for an alphabet of only eight letters, although in fact the Enigma worked on the ordinary 26-letter alphabet.

爲了簡便起見，圖中只表示了8個字母，實際中的謎機可以操作26個字母。