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?

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.

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!

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)