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16th IOCCC Winners Announced
chongo writes: "The winners of the 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) have been selected.
The judges are in the process of notifying the winners by EMail. We expect to release the source code around mid April 2002 after the winners have had a chance to review our writeup of their entries."
The winning descriptions sound pretty ho hum again this year. Although the X program and the interactive games are usually somewhat interesting since they waste a lot of your allotted bytes to get them started. Still haven't seen a really slick X program since the julia/mandelbrot viewer from the early 90's. And I'm definitely going to still be waiting for someone to top theorem from 1990.
Actually, its easy to write bad code which is hard to read, but much much hard to write code that is intentionally convoluted (and still functions). This contest gets some of the most knowledgable programers both submitting and reveiwing the code, so it ends up with code that is logically and syntactically far more twisted than an average bador lazy programmer could come up with.
I just wanted to clarify that obfuscated code is very different from bad code. Your vanilla variety bad code is not interesting, nor really clever, and generally not actually obfuscated. The point is to hide the intentions of the program; it's more about smoke and mirrors than confusion. For example, using ACII codes to represent text might be confusing, but you haven't really hidden anything. Now, writing a program that looks like it's calculating PI (or something) while actually the number that kinda looks like PI is the concatenation of ASCII codes for a program that actually calculates PI (or whatever) might be obfuscated. The apparent purpose of the code cleverly hides the real purpose. Really, the contest winners are more obfuscated algorithms than obfuscated code, which makes it a whole bunch more interesting. Take a look at some of the contest winners sometime, it can be a lot of fun. And therein lies the point of having the contest!
I know you meant this as a joke in the sense of assembly language being so much more difficult than obfuscated C, but it's only funny to people who are ignorant of programming in assembly.
Back when I used to do a fair amount of assembly programming along with C, I would often run the debugger in assembly mode to see exactly what was happening. Very often I could uncover subtle bugs that way.
I don't really do it as much anymore, primarily because I'm not familiar with the assembly of my modern machines anymore (alas).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The GPL explicitly defines source code as the preferred form of a program for modifying it.
To find out whether the gobbletygook you distribute is source code or not is simple: if you normally add features to the program by editing the gobbletygook, it's source. If you instead edit the stuff that you compiled to gobbletygook and then recompile it, then the stuff you distributed isn't source and it's a clear-cut GPL violation.