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."

Comments

Notified via Email

[tcd004]

I think you just notified them via Slashdot.

The Shadow Government Knows
tcd004

Assembler

[rif42]

> We expect to release the source code
> around mid April 2002

Will we also get a translation in assembler to help clarify the soure code?

Re:Assembler

[Reality Master 101]

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).

Re:Assembler

[VAXman]

Assembler generated from IOCCC programs will definitely not be obfuscated. Most of the obfuscation comes from the preproccesor, and compilers generate regular, boring code.

However, it definitely is possible to write highly obfuscated assembly, which would be far worse than anything done in C. Heck, with "db" you can do anything you want, and with an instruction set like IA32 you can do all sorts of insane things. Self-modifying code is also a lot easier in assembly. :-)

The list of who won

[chongo]

An updated list of who won the 16th IOCCC may be found at:

http://www.ioccc.org/whowon.html

We have already had one anonymous winner request to become non-anonymous.

10 minutes later and it's already /.

[LuxuryYacht]

Looks like this site is now the winner of todays International Obfuscated Website Contest due to the /. effect.

.

Re:10 minutes later and it's already /.

[Fweeky]

> International Obfuscated Website Contest

Good idea. There are so many technologies that could be used in a way that obfuscates sites; Flash, JavaScript, DHTML, tables, tag soup, box model abuse etc; unfortunately I suspect some existing and popular sites may well prove too hard to beat.

Still, could serve as a nice ironic way to point out why avoiding and abusing standards is Bad[tm].

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[Jesse Duke]

You're missing the point. From the IOCCC website :

To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program under the rules below.

To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way.

To stress C compilers with unusual code.

To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language.

To provide a safe forum for poor C code. :-)

If you use gcc, you probably have benefited from fixes of bugs those programs have helped uncover.

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[brennan73]

Yeah! I said the same thing when they started giving out awards for the worst academic prose. But no one listened, and now there are hordes of people going into philosophy and English just to win prestigious awards for terrible prose. And don't get me started on the Razzies, which have clearly encouraged intentionally poor filmmaking. I mean, why would you purposely award bad things? Oh, the humanity!

GPL Abuser WINS the IOCCC CONTEST!

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL ABUSER has WON the IOCCC CODE CONTEST!

Re:Did Microsoft enter this year?

[chongo]

We (the judges) don't look at who submitted the entries that did not win, so we could not tell you.

There was the Bill Gates award that was given out back in 1993.

On a slightly related topic, one can use the Best Utility from 1998 to pootify Microsoft's web site for better reading. :-)

To Fill In Those Who Are Slashdotted

[Peridriga]

The winner on this years contest is Microsoft for their submission of

Microsoft Corporation End User Agreement

Contributed by an anonymous user.

Re:Here's an idea for a contest

[mcc]

You may be interested in a type of program called a "polyglot"-- a program which is simultaneously valid, and preferably does the same thing, in more than one language simultaneously. Several previous IOCCC winners have been polyglots. (You maybe should look in particular at the one entry-- i'm *pretty* sure this was last year-- for a program that #DEFINED a bunch of english words as chunks of C that did the same thing the english words did, and then wrote a short *compilable* program in totally readable pseudocode.. with the gimmick being that the program actually did something wholly other than what the pseudocode said it did! Even if you know this coming in, it still is near impossible even on several readings to figure out how exactly it works out. It was rather cute.)

Anyway, a few polyglot-related links:

• here is the only Polyglot archive anywhere on the internet that i am aware of. Please, please read this link. It's amazing. My favorite is i think the quine (!!) which is simultaneously valid in C and Scheme. (It exploits the fact that ; is a comment operator in scheme, and is a really neat little read..)
• Here is the only polyglot i'm aware of which is not in the above archive.
• Here's a short little writeup on polyglots i did for everything2.com. It isn't that interesting.

With the crazy-ass language redefinition capabilities in perl 6, i think we can expect to see a resurgence in some very odd polyglots very soon..

Grrr.. mean, mean slashdot editors.. telling us the IOCCC winners were announced just so we can wait in suspense for a full month to see the entries.. bleh. I love the IOCCC..

An old anecdote

[frozenray]

Every time I hear about the IOCCC I'm reminded of this old anecdote:

The highlight of the annual Computer Bowl occurred when Bill Gates, who was a judge, posed the following question to the contestants:

"What contest, held via Usenet, is dedicated to examples of weird, obscure, bizarre, and really bad programming?"

After a moment of silence, Jean-Louis Gassee (ex-honcho at Apple) hit his buzzer and answered "Windows."

Mr. Bill's expression was, in the words of one who was there, "classic."

(source)

Obfuscated Wok Contest

[ZiZ]

I believe that one of the entries:

Best Abuse of User: Edward Rosten (England) - Greasy mouse

also qualifies for the Iron Chef competition. Or am I alone in thinking that Greasy Mouse sounds like some sort of England variant on Chinese/Indian cookery? *grin* (I can't wait to see this entry. I love the Abuse of User programs...)

The bad news...

[miracle69]

The winners will be notified by Obsfucated Email guised as spam.

Re:Anonymous 4

[cheezehead]

Let's see some obfuscated Ruby programs.

Or obfuscated perl scripts. Oh, wait a minute...

updated list of who won

[chongo]

We have had 3 winners convert to non-anonymous status. The list of recent winners is now:

Best of Show

Jason Orendorff (USA) - An Adventure-like game

Most likely to amaze

Anonymous (Great Britain) - x86/ELF dynamic binary translator

Best abuse of the rules (Most complete program)

Fabrice Bellard (France) - A C subset programming system for x86 that can compile and execute itself

Best X11 Game

John Williams (USA) - Missile Command

Best Short Program

Raymond Cheong (USA) - Arbitrary precision square root

Best position-independent code

Brian Westley (USA) - A punch card printer/sorter

Best Abuse of CPP

Immanuel Herrmann (Germany) - A Turing machine

Best Abuse of User

Edward Rosten (England) - Greasy mouse

Best One-Liner

Jens Schweikhardt (Germany) - A shell glob matcher

Best curses Game

Kevin Pulo (Australia) - A Pong-like game across network

Most eye-crossing

Immanuel Herrmann (Germany) - A SIRDS-shaped SIRDS generator

Most obfuscated sound

Pierre-Philippe Coupard (USA) - A talking clock

Best primal ASCII graphics

Nicolas Ollinger (France) - Prints primes with a sieve graph

Best AI

Doug Beardsley (USA) - A suicide chess program

Worst driver

Chris King (USA) - A driver game