--- title: The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) | daily.dev description: A classic humorous after-dinner speech delivered at the Zurich Seminar in 1984, presenting a comedic 'five-minute graduate course' in coding theory. It traces... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) | daily.dev og:description: A classic humorous after-dinner speech delivered at the Zurich Seminar in 1984, presenting a comedic 'five-minute graduate course' in coding theory. It traces... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/tdXEhjtmz.png og:image:alt: The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 18 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A classic humorous after-dinner speech delivered at the Zurich Seminar in 1984, presenting a comedic 'five-minute graduate course' in coding theory. It traces the fictional lives of Alice and Bob — the canonical characters of cryptography papers — and riffs on source coding, channel coding, and secrecy coding through jokes, wordplay, and absurd analogies. Highlights include a parody of DES and RSA as joke-encryption systems, a fictional Caesar cipher letter revealing a hidden fourth part of Gaul, and a darkly comic tale of a man's deteriorating relationship with his pocket calculator. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 8 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-30). **TL;DR:** The community warmly receives this 1984 classic as a beloved, perennially enjoyable piece worth resurfacing, with most comments expressing appreciation rather than critique. A small side thread discusses HN's 'second chance pool' mechanism that brought it back to the front page. **Sentiment:** 85% positive · 10% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Commenters praise it as both educational and entertaining, calling it 'wonderful' and 'a classic.' - Multiple commenters note it bears resurfacing periodically, with at least one having posted it themselves years ago. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters universally enjoy the piece, with the only friction being a brief meta-discussion about HN's second-chance pool reposting mechanism. **Open questions** - What is the backstory of the Mort, Elvis, and Einstein MS personas and their personal relationships, as distinct from Alice and Bob? **Highlights** > This one of my favorite speeches for being both educational and entertaining. It's especially gratifying to learn the background story for the mysterious Alice and Bob. > — [jsrcout on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49116530) > Repeat or not this is wonderful. > — [foobiekr on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111894) > Second chance pool, it's been a feature since before your account was created. It's a list (second link below) of submissions that didn't gain much traction and gets drawn from to add to the front page periodically. They get an artificially inflated ranking and temporarily changed submission time (which impacts ranking) to give them another chance. https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/pool - Your submission is on the third page here https://news.ycombinator.com/invited - Another way old posts come back > — [Jtsummers on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112572) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966101) · 11 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067162) · 44 points · 8 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Alice in Wonderland is mostly math jokes — Storica](https://daily.dev/posts/alice-in-wonderland-is-mostly-math-jokes-storica-lyjlmtwwv) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Mar '26 Notes](https://daily.dev/posts/mar-26-notes-ko7lksu0e) · Susam Pal · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#cryptography](https://daily.dev/tags/cryptography) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz"},"datePublished":"2026-07-30T17:57:39.933Z","dateModified":"2026-07-30T23:47:04.339Z","description":"A classic humorous after-dinner speech delivered at the Zurich Seminar in 1984, presenting a comedic 'five-minute graduate course' in coding theory. 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