16th IOCCC Winners Released

An anonymous submitter wrote: "A while ago the 16th IOCCC winners were announced. Apparently "releas[ing] the winning source by mid April 2002" actually means "within a year", but you can finally enjoy them here. Or, if you don't enjoy them, you can beat your head against the wall trying to figure out how these programs work ;-)"

Comments

Re:My entry:

[Anonymous Coward]

is anyone stupid enough to run something with execlp() posted on /. ?

Formatting?

[Quixote]

Is it me, or is relying on formatting to obfuscate your code a bit cheesy? IMHO, a true work of art would be nicely formatted and all that, and still be incomprehensible beyond belief.

I thought you couldn't use #defines like that.

[Dthoma]

Aren't the rules such that if you use #defines in that stupid way your entry is disqualified? Or is that just me being bitter because someone used #define in an annoying manner?

Re:My favorite...

[NoInfo]

But have you seen 2001's 'Best of Show' entry?

How the IOCCC was started

[chongo]

One day (23 March 1984 to be exact), back Larry Bassel and I (Landon Curt Noll) were working for National Semiconductor's Genix porting group, we were both in our offices trying to fix some very broken code. Larry had been trying to fix a bug in the classic Bourne shell (C code #defined to death to sort of look like Algol) and I had been working on the finger program from early BSD (a bug ridden finger implementation to be sure). We happened to both wander (at the same time) out to the hallway in Building 7C to clear our heads.

We began to compare notes: "You won't believe the code I am trying to fix". And: "Well you cannot imagine the brain damage level of the code I'm trying to fix". As well as: "It more than bad code, the author really had to try to make it this bad!"

After a few minutes we wandered back into my office where I posted a flame to net.lang.c inviting people to try and out obfuscate the UN*X source code we had just been working on.

(I had to post this typo correction :-). Thus began the tradition of putting typos in the contest rules and guidelines ... to make them more obfuscated of course! :-)

BTW: This posting was made back in the days when AT&T was the evil giant. Now, Microsoft makes AT&T look mild and kind in comparison. :-( (IMHO) ).

BTW: See the story about the ''Bill Gates'' award. :-)

OK, back to the story. We received a number of entries by EMail. When we began to receive messages from outside of the US, Larry and I decided to include International in the name. The 1st IOCCC winners were posted on 17 April 1984.

There were 4 winners in 1984.

1. <dis>honorable mention
2. 3rd place
3. 2nd place
4. 1st place

The <dis>honorable mention wished to remain anonymous. While many have asked who it was, we have continued to follow the author's wish to remain anonymous. A few years ago, we asked the author if they still wanted to remain anonymous. They said: "Yes, I want to keep my anonymity. But you can tell them that I am a well known for my connection to the C language". The only other anonymous winner occurred this year.

The 1984 winner remains one of my all time favorites.

The name used in the posting of the 1st IOCCC winner posting was International Obfuscated C Code Contest or IOCCC for short.

The posting said 1st annual, so in 1985 we held the 2nd IOCCC contest and the tradition continues as the longest running contest on the Internet.

P.S. Part of the inspiration for making the IOCCC a contest goes to the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.

P^2.S. See the overall README for more details.

P^3.S. See also the IOCCC FAQ.

P^4.S. Please see my apology for the late posting of the 2001 winners.