Instant, five minute graduate course in coding theory

A tale of Alice, Bob, and pocket calculators.

Coding theorists are concerned with two things. Firstly and most importantly they are concerned with the private lives of two people called Alice and Bob. In theory papers, whenever a coding theorist wants to describe a transaction between two parties he doesn't call then A and B. No. For some longstanding traditional reason he calls them Alice and Bob. 

Now there are hundreds of papers written about Alice and Bob. Over the years Alice and Bob have tried to defraud insurance companies, they've played poker for high stakes by mail, and they've exchanged secret messages over tapped telephones. 

If we put together all the little details from here and there, snippets from lots of papers, we get a fascinating picture of their lives. This may be the first time a definitive biography of Alice and Bob has been given.

...

Science has marched ahead so fast that we take for granted the most incredible technological developments. Magnetrons, which were a closely guarded secret during the 1939-45 war are now part of every microwave cooker. And made in Japan. When I was a child, space travel was science fiction. Yet today, advance is so rapid that even the astronauts who set foot on the moon in 1969 had never seen a digital watch. Nor a pocket calculator. 

Pocket calculators! Now there's something. They're so complicated! I have a calculator which has sines, cosines, tangents, logarithms, hyperbolic functions and multiple nested parentheses. You can program it in Fortran, Algol, Basic, Pascal, Forth, Fifth and Sixth, ADA and Carruthers. It will factorize primes for you. At present it's working on the Halting Problem. 

It translates from one language to another. From German to Spanish. From Macedonian to Esperanto. From Cantonese to Greek. Or from American to English. 

It is, in fact, a multiprocessor system. There are 22 Transputers in there. Sometimes they organize a game of football between them. 

It has a full color, wraparound wide screen, liquid crystal, three-dimensional holographic display. It's called HoloChromaCinePhotoRamaScope.

Its audio facilities include Dolby Digital Decaphonic surround sound. On the way here I watched "The Labyrinth" on it. 

It also has synthetic speech and a voice recognition system. I often talk to it. I tell it my problems. Sometimes it psychoanalyses me. It has me figured as paranoid. But that's just because it keeps getting at me. But don't get me wrong - it can be very user friendly. In fact you can program precisely HOW user friendly you want it is to be on a scale from ONE to TEN.

There's much more where that came from, probably takes slightly more than five minutes to read but well worth it. It's definitely amusing (whenever a word looks funny and you don't recognize it, look it up as he's probably making a clever reference), and even a bit informative. Technology is pretty incredible when you think about it.