单词

• singlehandedly: 一己之力地
• superfluous: 多余的
• redundant: 被裁减的

句子

• 这则信息即使以光速传递也用了11个多小时才到达目标，远远超出了冥王星的运行轨道。然而，令人难以置信的是，这个小小的探测器设法接收到了来自母星的微弱信号，并且成功地完成了转换。

  Even travelling at the speed of light, the message took over 11 hours to reach its target, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Yet, incredibly, the little probe managed to hear the faint call from its home planet, and successfully made the switchover.

• 这是人类历史上最远的远程维修工作，这既是美国航天航空局工程师们的胜利，也突出了美国通讯工程师克劳德•香农所研发的技术的惊奇力量。香农于一年前过世，他生于 1916年，在很小的时候就展现了数学和器械制造方面的天賦，读书的时候就已经在计算机技术基础方面取得了突破了.

  It was the longest distance repair job in history, and a triumph for the NASA engineers. But it also highlighted the astonishing power of the techniques developed by American communications engineer Claude Shannon, who had died just a year earlier. Born in 1916, Shannon showed an early talent for maths and for building gadgets, and made breakthroughs in the foundations of computer technology when still a student.

• 在二十世纪四十年代，香农就凭己之力创建了完整的通信科学，并将其引入了各种应用领域，从数宇多功能光盘到卫星通信，再到条形码，简言之，传递数据需要既快又准确.

  In the 1940s, Shannon singlehandedly created an entire science of communication which has since inveigled its way into a host of applications, from DVDs to satellite communication to bar codes–any area, in short, where data has to be conveved rapidly yet accurately.

• 香农在确定了这个基本单位后，开始定义关于信息模糊的概念，并考虑如何将信息从一个地方传递到另一个地方。在此过程中，他发现了一些令人惊讶的现象：保证信息通过“噪音，的随机干扰而完好无损是可能的。

  Having identified this fundamental unit, Shannon set about defining otherwise vague ideas about information and how to transmit it from place to place. In the process he discovered something surprising: it is always possible to guarantee information will get through random interference “noise” intact.

• 1993 年，工程师们发现了所谓的并行级联卷积码，取得了重大突破，这种级联卷积码非常接近香农的最大速率的最终极限，可以可靠地传输数据，在移动视频电话变革中发挥了关键作用.

  As recently as 1993, engineers made a major breakthrough by discovering so-called turbo codes–which come very close to Shannon’s ultimate limit for the maximum rate that data can be transmitted reliably, and now play a key role in the mobile videophone revolution.

1. The space probe, Voyager I, launched in 1977, had sent back spectacular images of Jupiter and Saturn and then soared out of the Solar System on a one-way mission to the stars. After 25 years of exposure to the freezing temperatures of deep space, the probe was beginning to show its age, sensors and circuits were on the brink of failing and NASA experts realized that they had to do something or lose contact with their probe forever. The solution was to get a message to Voyager I to instruct it to use spares to change the failing parts.

   旅行者1号太空探测器于 1977 年发射升空，它返回了木星和士星的壮观图像，然后飞离了太阳系，飞往其他行星完成单行任务。它在深层太空的冰冻温度下暴露25年之后，开始显现使用寿命的问题，传感器和电路板已经处在失效的边缘，美国航天航空局的专家们意识到应该做些什么，否则将与这个探测器永远失去联系，于是他们决定向旅行者1号发送信息，指示其使用备用零件更换出;现故障的零件。

2. Noise usually means unwanted sounds which interfere with genuine information. Information theory generalizes this idea via theorems that capture the effects of noise with mathematical precision. In particular, Shannon showed that noise sets a limit on the rate at which information can pass along communication channels while remaining error-free. This rate depends on therelative strengths of the signal and noise travelling down the communication channel, and on its capacity (its “bandwidth”).

噪声通常指干扰真实信息的多余声音，通过数学精度来捕获噪音效果的信息理论定理总结了这一想法。香农特别指出，在保持无误的情况下，噪声限制了信息在信道的传递速度，该速度取决于通讯信道中传递的信号和噪声的相对强度和容量（带宽）。

1. Over the years, scientists have devised many such coding methods, and they have proved crucial in many technological feats. The Voyager spacecraft transmitted data using codes which added one extra bit for every single bit of information; the result was an error rate of just one bit in 10,000-and stunningly clear pictures of the planets.

多年来，科学家们设计了很多类似的编码方法，并证明了这些方法在许多科技成就中起到了关键的作用。旅行者号航天器使用了为每一个比特信息都附加一个额外比特的编码方式传递数据，结果显示其错误率仅为万分之一，所以获得了极其清晰的行星图片。