Edinburgh’s computer scientists have banned “Alice and Bob” from being used as too “western”

The names Alice and Bob should not be used, computer science lecturers were told at the recent decolonization campaign at the University of Edinburgh.

The high-profile Russell Group University’s computer science department claims there are “problematic issues with computer terminology.”

Employees should “avoid using predominantly Western names like Alice / Bob, as is common in computer security literature,” according to internal documents from The Telegraph.

In cryptography and digital culture, Alice and Bob are a fictional couple often used as placeholders to illustrate how protocols and systems work.

The use of the term “master / slave” to represent computer agents is also discouraged in faculty courses, and staff are encouraged to “use coordinators or workers instead”.

It is part of the institution̵

7;s intensified efforts to decolonize, which a steering group of academics has set up to identify “controversial elements of the university’s past” in order to be able to make “reparation recommendations”.

On Saturday evening, a former education minister described the moves as “absurd” and a “tyrannical” attempt to control thoughts.

The faculty, which runs various computer science courses, said it needs to “challenge and revise the current pedagogy (the teaching approach) that is rooted in imperial and colonial notions of knowledge and learning.”