Alice, Bob, and …

In cryptography there has been a long tradition of calling two parties involved in a protocol Alice and Bob. This tradition has been proudly maintained in quantum information science, no doubt in large part because quantum cryptography was one of the first ideas in quantum information science. One of the nicest things about the Alice/Bob labeling scheme is that it allows one to use gender to distinguish parties. I suspect that since gender is dear to our animal hearts, this concise way of refering to parties has significant syntactic advantage. David Mermin once said something along the lines of “if quantum information contributes nothing else to physics it least it will have given us Alice and Bob.” Actually, where I’ve found the Alice/Bob labeling scheme most efficient is in special relativity where it allows one to give gender to different reference frames (note also that since all frames are equal…) It is much clearer to most students when you refer to “his reference frame” or “her reference frame.”
Along these lines, when you have to introduce a new party, it is traditional to call this party Eve. This is usually done because in cryptography, Eve is the eavesdroping malicious third party. But this screws up the whole gender roles efficient labeling. I therefore propose that instead of calling the third party Eve, we should call the third party E.T., or Elephant, or Eagle such that we can use “it” to refer to this party. Now what do we do for four parties?