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

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)

urbigenous.net

107 pointsColinWright21 comments

Related. Others?

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820893 - April 2018 (23 comments)

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173482 - July 2016 (18 comments)

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8455489 - Oct 2014 (10 comments)

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1372371 - May 2010 (3 comments)

As someone whose real name actually IS "Bob" I've always been hugely proud to have played an integral part in so many wonderful things.

Alice just grumbles about it, though.

“The Secret Adventures of Alice and Bob” would be an excellent sitcom.

And here I thought that Bruce Shneier started the Alice and Bob stuff ;/

There is another alphabet he skipped (here are the parts I remember offhand):

A as in I or R, C as in Q or Zar or Chi, E as in I or L or F, G as in Nu, H as in U or Our, K as in Nife, M as in Nemonic, P as in Sycho or Terodactyl, S as in C or Shoe, W as in Y or Ry, X as in Zylophone, Y as in U

Looks like we have R, S, and A of RSA to thank.

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

I always figured it came from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_%26_Carol_%26_Ted_%26_Alic...

and that by referencing Bob & Alice one got an extra frisson because of "Swapping partners, Bob and Alice kiss fervently, as do Ted and Carol..." - that is to say Bob (the free love liberal man) and Alice (the conservative commitment woman) are put together in all these anecdotes because it is naughty and naughtiness adds to the amusement.

After a while of course nobody remembered the naughty movie and people just used Bob & Alice because those were the names one used for this kind of thing.

I always assumed it was just giving names to the letters A, B and C, especially since a French cryptographer in a workshop told me that they use Amelie, Bernarde and Carole in French classes.

I thought it was something to do with quantum entanglement, since Alice and Bob are commonly used to explain Bell's theorem. Chris Ferrie even uses them in his book Quantum Entanglement for Babies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

Great speech, the funnier the more you already know about information theory and cryptography; but the last part with the pocket calculator seems a break of topic, I would have left that out.

probably unrelated observation..

> Nothing else is like information. Information is very peculiar stuff.

and the whole software circus is dealing with.. information. Moving, storing, creating, destroying. A kind of commodity, like (but also unlike) energy and water, oil and money. And which turned the software into similar commodity.

Hence this whole software.. domain.. has become extremely Loaded.. in political and ethical ways. dirty? maybe. But definitely not anymore refreshing

Adding "considering all alice and bob scenarios" to LLM prompts is surprisingly useful.

Africa isn't a country, but Algeria is.

This was last discussed 6 years ago. The pocket calculator can now finally accomplish all described tasks.

Every time I see "Alice and Bob" I think of Alice and Bill's Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola.

But, do Alice and Bob know Mel?

Mallory, surely?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

You should totally post that.

It's been posted many, many, many times.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=story+of+mel

;-)

Yeah. But in the context of Alice and Bob I consider this to be more relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

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