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The 17th IOCCC is Now Open!

Posted by Cliff on from the putting-your-code-fu-to-the-test dept.

SimonCooper inputs: "Are you frustrated with software bloat? If so then you might want to consider submitting a little something to The 17th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The contest is now open for submissions and runs from midnight Jan 7th, 2004 through the end of 29th Feb 2004 (all times in UTC!). Later on in January it will be possible to submit entries using a web form."

25 comments

  1. The Ultimate Obfuscation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    - Take C code
    - Translate it into APL
    - Print out code
    - Drink coffee and beer quite sloppily while reading code
    - Put code in file cabinet in basement behind locked door that has a sign on it "Beware of Leopard".

    1. Re:The Ultimate Obfuscation by Carnildo · · Score: 1

      I don't know about that. Compared to some of the stuff in the IOCCC, APL is pretty tame.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    2. Re:The Ultimate Obfuscation by aled · · Score: 2, Funny

      You forgot first going in the isolation tank with the hallucinogen drugs until you get to right state of mind for IOCCC.

      --

      "I think this line is mostly filler"
  2. Another win for M$! by simonecaldana · · Score: 3, Funny

    Microsft is going to win hands down, they would simple have to submit some windows source code.

    1. Re:Another win for M$! by gazbo · · Score: 3, Funny

      Are you allowed to say that under the NDA you obviously signed given that you've obviously actually seen Windows code and aren't just making "an hilarious" karma-whoring "joke"?

    2. Re:Another win for M$! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or maybe Linus Torvalds will win with his unbelievably obfuscated version of SCO's UnixWare?

      (Yes, that's a lame joke too. It's so lame that I have to tell it's a joke not to be moderated down as flamebait. And you should know it's not flamebait when it's true. Alright, the last sentence there was flamebait. But not anymore now that I've admitted it was. Now it's a joke. Funny! Laugh! Now give me my precious karma points, you fucking retard moderators! So now I'm a troll. Maybe I should post this anonymously. Or maybe I just should buy some cigarettes. Being a non-smoker makes me weird. Let this message be a warning if you consider to quit smoking. It's not worth it. You'll be like me, and there's nothing as disgusting as a self-concious troll. Cigarettes, cigarettes ... I'm off!)

    3. Re:Another win for M$! by simonecaldana · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm sorry, I can't answer you. I signed an NDA which forbids me to.

  3. Assuming, of course... by MarkusQ · · Score: 4, Funny

    Later on in January it will be possible to submit entries using a web form.

    Assuming, of course, that they don't have a lameness filter.

    -- MarkusQ

  4. UTC not obfuscated enough by Lionel+Hutts · · Score: 1

    UTC is a pretty complicated system, but it's hardly obscure enough for this purpose. They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).

    --
    I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
    1. Re:UTC not obfuscated enough by jonadab · · Score: 1

      > They should use plain UT (which is UTC without leap seconds).

      That's hardly more obscure than just using UTC. They should use
      microfortnights since the beginning of the reign of Cyrus the Great,
      expressed in one's complement notation.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  5. Not hard enough! by Larry+David · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obfuscated C code is one thing, and they make some great stuff, like that miniature BASIC interpreter which won last year (or was it 2002?). But if you want a REAL challenge, perhaps we should invent a new competition..

    The first International Readable Perl Code Contest. Your challenge.. write any application in Perl that's over 100 lines and that at least two other programmers can understand. We don't expect to have any winners for the next few years, but get coding.. and we'll see you soon!

    1. Re:Not hard enough! by aled · · Score: 4, Funny

      You know that Larry Wall (creator of Perl) won at least twice at IOCCC? that explains somethings...

      --

      "I think this line is mostly filler"
    2. Re:Not hard enough! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How to miss the point completely in one easy lesson.

      Not sure why you were moderated Flamebait, though - Redundant, or possibly Humourless Git, would have been more appropriate.

    3. Re:Not hard enough! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      W311 1\/3 |o33|\| k0c|1|\|g 1n p3r1 4 1i|3 0101mo & |\/|y |\/|a 4n+ r33c| \/\/4+ I k0d3. |]00d, 2p14n |-|0\/\/ i+2 r34d 4|o13.

    4. Re:Not hard enough! by jonadab · · Score: 1

      > The first International Readable Perl Code Contest

      Readable Perl is easy. (Actually, I find even bad Perl code easier to read
      than "good" C code.) No, if you want a challenge in readability, we should
      have an International Readable PostScript Code Contest. That language is ugly.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    5. Re:Not hard enough! by jonadab · · Score: 1

      I don't know where Perl gets this totally undeserved reputation for obfuscation.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    6. Re:Not hard enough! by jonadab · · Score: 2, Informative

      > any application in Perl that's over 100 lines

      You do realize, do you not, that 100 lines is a whole lot of Perl. I know, in
      C that's barely enough to declare your data structures for a medium-sized
      CGI script, but a Perl program tends to be shorter. (There *are* really
      large apps written in Perl (Bugzilla comes to mind), but if they were written
      in C they'd be 2-10 times larger, depending on what they do.)

      For example, consider an application that connects to the slashdot web server,
      retrieves the main page, fills in the username and password, submits the form,
      extracts the list of headlines from the result, checks them against a MySQL
      database to see which ones are new since last time, displays those, and then
      sleeps for some predetermined amount of time. In C, that's probably well over
      100 lines of code. In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.
      Yeah, that's using a couple of modules from the CPAN, but that's roughly the
      equivalent of includes in C, and I *know* you don't want to try the above in
      C without including some string handling libraries.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    7. Re:Not hard enough! by jonadab · · Score: 2, Informative

      > In Perl, we write that in ten lines and play golf with it.

      In fact...

      use WWW::Mechanize; use DBI; $\=$/;
      my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=slashdot;host=loc alhost", 'dbuser', 'dbpasswd', {'RaiseError' => 1});
      my $query = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * from headlines WHERE title=? and seen='yes'");
      my $update = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO headlines SET seen='yes', title=?");
      while (1) {
      ($m = WWW::Mechanize->new())->get("http://slashdot.org") ;
      $m->form_number(1); $m->set_fields(unickname=>'slashuser',upasswd=>'sl ashpass'); $m->click();
      for (($m->content()) =~ m/size="?4[^>]*><b>(.*?)<\/b>/ig ) {
      $query->execute($_); (print and $update->execute($_)) unless $query->fetchrow_array() }
      sleep 10 }

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    8. Re:Not hard enough! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now see, you're not being equal here and thats the problem with most people who only program in perl, php, python, ...

      Do all that in perl w/o using CPAN and all from scratch -- which is the exact limitations you're placing on C. I'm guessing if you had to do everything in perl with just using the basical socket library, your application would be a hell of a lot more than 10 lines.

    9. Re:Not hard enough! by jonadab · · Score: 1

      > Now see, you're not being equal here and thats the problem with most people
      > who only program in perl, php, python, ... Do all that in perl w/o using
      > CPAN and all from scratch -- which is the exact limitations you're placing
      > on C.

      No, frankly, if I placed that limitation on C (no includes), Hello World would
      be more than ten lines, much less that program. No, you can use as many
      standard, freely-available, off-the-shelf libraries as you want, provided
      any fairly accomplished C programmer would know where to find them.

      This is one thing advocates of languages like C often don't get about Perl --
      most of your application is already written, almost no matter what you're
      doing, and has been tested by other Perl programmers who have used it on
      various platforms under various circumstances. CPAN is the soul of Perl.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  6. How to win easily by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Linux has a random code generator built in the kernel. To activate it, press alt+printscreen+o.

    1. Re:How to win easily by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      alt+printscreen+b would have been a better troll, it does a hardreboot instead of a soft one.

  7. Tried it by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've never placed though. Had an othello game and an encrypted program within a program (interpreter). In retrospect I probably should have chosen a different game because othello had been done before, and written a bigger program to run on the interpreter.

    I recognize one of the 2000 winners though from the Robot Battle Mailing List, long before he was in the contest.