The names Alice and Bob should not be used, computer science lecturers have been told, in the latest decolonisation drive at the University of Edinburgh.

The top-flight Russell Group university’s school of informatics claims there are “problematic issues related to computing terminology”.

Staff should “avoid using predominantly Western names such as Alice/Bob, as is common in the computer security literature”, according to internal documents seen by The Telegraph.

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

The terms “master/slave” to represent computing agents are also being discouraged in the faculty’s courses, with staff urged to “instead use coordinator or workers”.

It forms part of intensifying decolonisation efforts at the institution, which has formed a steering group of academics to identify “controversial elements of the university’s past” so that “reparatory recommendations” can be made.

On Saturday night, a former education minister branded the moves “preposterous” and a “tyrannical” attempt to police thoughts.

The faculty, which runs various computer science courses, said it “must challenge and rework the current pedagogy (approach to teaching), which was rooted in imperial and colonial ideas about knowledge and learning”.