Talk:Alice and Bob/Draft

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Revision as of 20:13, 10 August 2010 by imported>Sandy Harris (→‎Date of birth?)
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But what about Ted and Carol?

"Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice" is the first thing that comes to mind when I see this. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:54, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Date of birth?

Do you know when (approximately?) Alice and Bob first appeared? Could they be immigrants from game theory?

As for the additional characters: Were they present in the first edition, too? If so, then this edition should be cited as the "origin" of the names. (If you do not know, I probably can check it.)

--Peter Schmitt 12:11, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't have the 1st edition of AC.
The biography we link to is from a 1984 conference on coding theory. Alice & Bob were not new then; Gordon mentions "some longstanding traditional reason" for the names and says "there are hundreds of papers about Alice and Bob". The original RSA paper, 1978, uses Alice & Bob. Beyond that, I've no idea of their birthdate, or for that matter, their parentage. Sandy Harris 10:07, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
The WP article [1] and a Network World story they link to say the origin is the RSA paper. Sandy Harris 10:12, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
I added a link to the Network World story and text that follows them in attributing the names to Rivest. Sandy Harris 01:13, 11 August 2010 (UTC)