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

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: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)