Please avoid the biased default of Alice (female) being the assistant and Bob (male) being the higher-ranking person. Varying names in general is desirable, not only to avoid these pitfalls, but also to force ourselves to recognize that we tend to choose stereotypically white names that are not even representative of our own communities, much less the global community.
The Alice/Bob naming convention has nothing to do with rank; they’re alphabetical by order of first mention. I believe the convention started in contexts where the author is likely to start with prose and switch into math with single-letter names A and B.
Please avoid the biased default of Alice (female) being the assistant and Bob (male) being the higher-ranking person. Varying names in general is desirable, not only to avoid these pitfalls, but also to force ourselves to recognize that we tend to choose stereotypically white names that are not even representative of our own communities, much less the global community.
The Alice/Bob naming convention has nothing to do with rank; they’re alphabetical by order of first mention. I believe the convention started in contexts where the author is likely to start with prose and switch into math with single-letter names A and B.