Explaining Zero Knowledge to your children

[Eli Brandt]

Hadmut Danisch suggested:
> Alice is caught in a dark room somewhere on the world. She doesn't know
> where she is, but there is a telephone in the room and she calls Bob to
> ask him where she is. Bob claims to know it but doesn't want to reveal. 
> He calls her back. When the phone is ringing, he has proven the knowledge

I don't think this captures the structure of a ZNP.  There's no
multi-round system, for one thing.

how about this:
Alice and Bob have a big, complicated maze, preferably non-planar.
Alice can solve the maze, and wants to prove this to Bob.
Alice picks a point P on a solution path.
Bobs asks Alice to
	(a) exhibit a path from Start to P.
   or	(b) exhibit a path from P to Finish.
Alice can easily do either one.

If Alice doesn't know the maze, she can try to cheat, 
by picking a P by tracing forwards from Start,
or by tracing backwards from Finish.
These ploys allow her to sleaze through tests (a) and (b) respectively.
But if Bob flips a coin to select (a) versus (b), he has a 50-percent
chance of catching with each round.

This is not really zero-knowledge.  With each round, Alice is giving
Bob substantial knowledge about the maze.  With sufficient rounds,
she ends up giving him the whole thing.  But if the maze is hairy
enough, this captures the idea that Alice can prove (to within epsilon)
to Bob that she has a solution, without giving it away entirely.

--
   Eli Brandt
   eli+ at cs.cmu.edu