The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) | Hacker News Reader

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)

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93 pointsqwertyuiop92418 comments

Those interested in cryptology and coding theory should definitely consider "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. It's a great account of how cryptology was used throughout history.

"The Information" is an excellent book with similar themes.

I agree, just finished reading it. Does a good job explaining cryptography and its evolution through time. As well as having interesting examples and being well written.

His book on Fermat's Last Theorem is also excellent.

Simon Singh is a fantastic pop-sci writer. His Big Bang was an incredibly accessible accounting of the history of astronomy, and how the slow, messy, incremental accumulation of knowledge about space eventually led to the Big Bang theory and beyond.

Someone want to explain the alphabet joke? "A for 'orse, B for..."

AFAICT, it's a series of puns, based on phonetic sounds. 'ay is for 'orses, 'ell for leather, that sort of thing.

Thanks! Makes sense, want picking those up

Wikipedia has a nice article, you might need some of the alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_Alphabet

That's great, thanks!

Thanks. I didn't recognize it either, but guessed it was Cockney rhyming slang (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang), another somewhat similar way to do wordplay in English.

I find it interesting that exaggerated description of the pocket calculator at the end sounded a lot like a smart phone. Looks like predictions about future tech can be accurate after all.

I feel like the most accurate predictions start as satire or comedy, not as serious bets. Satire plays to our gut instinct of what we suspect from the nature of future, and is shielded from technical criticism, so people feel more comfortable to take a stab at it without having to hedge.

There was a short story, which appeared in one of the HP calculator-centric publications of the 70's or 80's, I think written by a certain George R.R. Martin or Gordon Dickson, which attempted to extrapolate the HP 41CX into a portable voice activated assistant that could schedule appointments for you. I remember thinking that was pretty far fetched for a calculator. I don't think it would have made much more sense if the author had referred to the device as a "phone"...

On the one hand, if you squint, yes, we all have them in our pockets.

On the other hand, I recall a lot of "personal assistant" predictions in which phones were personal assistants, not just glorified calendars. As in, able to call the other person and do a live negotiation of times over voice, possibly with the other person's assistant. We don't have that yet; that turns out to be harder than we thought. Even the recent trend towards "bots" are still focusing on people interacting with the bots; nobody's brave enough to have the bots reaching out to people other than their customers and interacting with them yet, AFAIK. (Those who seem to use a lot of humans in the backend.)

Poor Eve. Always the villain.

mandatory XKCD reference?

https://xkcd.com/177/

Loved this line, never saw it before.

We are told by Suetonius that Julius Caesar communicated with the Orator Cicero in a cipher in which 'A' was sent as 'B', 'B' as 'C' and so on. If you apply this cipher to HAL - the computer in the Stanley Kubrick movie: 2001 - you get IBM.

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