IOCCC Winners Announced

Arachn1d writes "The IOCCC has finally announced the winners of the 2004 contest.
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."

Comments

Obfuscation

[BoldAC]

For those who don't know what this is all about...

It's all about how to obfuscate baby!

Re:Obfuscation

[Anonymous Coward]

How-to-obfuscate in Python

http://p-nand-q.com/python/lambdaizing_quicksort.h tml

Windows CE?

[wackysootroom]

Was the Mini-Os Windows CE by any chance? I'd bet that's pretty obfuscated!

Re:Umm

[TheShadowHawk]

Maybe that's the whole point. Everything (including the article) is well... obfuscated.

If the IOCCC is like the IOC

[Omega1045]

If the IOCCC is anything like the IOC, I am sure they will ask some of the winners to give back their prizes because of judging mistakes, and probably screwed over several Russian participants.

I can smell the smoke from here...

[pedestrian crossing]

Since the summary isn't very informative, and the servers are rapidly slowing down, it is the International Obsfucated C Code Contest. About all that is (was?) on their page is the list of winners...

Additional Mirror

[pikine]

us1 mirror and see Google cache for more.

Site content

[houghi]

Not much. No source code yet. Here is the content of the site:

Here are the names and categories for the winners of the 17th IOCCC. The source code has not been released yet. The winners have been notified by EMail. They will be given a chance to review the write-up of their entry. Once this process is complete the source code will be made available on the winning entries web page. We anticipate that this will be in mid-October.

The winners are,

* Best of Show

Gavin Barraclough - Mini-OS
Manchester, UK

screenshot

* Best One-Liner

Eryk Kopczynski - OCR of 8, 9, 10 and 11
Warszawa, Poland

* Best Utility

Don Yang - A CRC inserter
Covina, California, USA

* Best Non-Use of Curses

Mark Schnitzius - Editor animation
Singapore

* Best X11 Game

Daniel Vik - X Windows car racing game
La Jolla, California, USA

screenshot

* Best use of "Precious" Lines

Anonymous - Rendering of a stroked font
Singapore

screenshot

* Best Abuse of CPP

Daniel Vik - Calculates prime numbers using only CPP
La Jolla, California, USA

* Best Calculated Risk

Brent Burley - A Poker game
Burbank, California, USA

* Best use of Vision

Nick Johnson - Curses maze displayer/navigator with only line-of-sight visibility
Christchurch, New Zealand

* Best Font Engine

Jeff Newbern - Renders arbitary bitmapped fonts
Springwood, Queensland, Australia

* Most Functional Output

Jonathan Hoyle - Curses based polynomial graphing with auto-scale
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

* Best use of Light and Spheres

Anders Gavare - A ray tracer
Gothenburg, Sweden

screenshot

* Best Abuse of Indentation

Stephen Sykes - Space/tab/linefeed steganography
Helsinki, Finland

* Best Abuse of the Guidelines

Anthony Howe - A CGI capable HTTP server
Cannes, France

* Best Abuse of the Periodic Table

John Dalbec - Conway's look'n'say sequence split into elements
Canfield, Ohio, USA

Re:Umm

[ophix]

wouldnt it need to be an UNobfuscated perl code contest? ;}

Mirrors

[lachlan76]

Before it all goes down, here are the mirrors:

Asia
* http://www.tw.ioccc.org/ - Hsin-Chu, Taiwan (24 48' N 120 59' E)

* Australia and other Pacific http://www.au.ioccc.org/ - Sydney, Australia (34 0' S 151 0' E)

Europe
* http://www.de.ioccc.org/ - Hamburg, Germany (53 33' N 10 2' E)
* http://www.es.ioccc.org/ - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)
* http://www.gr.ioccc.org/ - Athens, Greece (38 00' N 23 44' E)
* North America www0.us.ioccc.org - Sunnyvale California, US (37 22' N 122 02' W)
* www1.us.ioccc.org - Saint Paul, Minnesota US (44 57' N 93 06' W)

Time to turn in your geek card...

[GillBates0]

Every self respecting geek knows what the IOCCC is. By admitting that you don't, you've demonstrated your inability to cope with the rigorous demands of abiding by the high standards of geekiness.

Please hand in your Geek membership card on your way out. Thank you.

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[lachlan76]

Not only that, I don't consider the ability to churn out unreadable code a good trait in a programmer

To be able to make something like that, you need to be able to understand the language well, which is a good thing.

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[Emil Brink]

Whoa there, turn up the humour and creativity-appreciation knobs a couple of notches please. I don't think anyone likes to see obfuscated code in production environments, but if you haven't read any IOCCC entries, you should. They can be real eye-openers when it comes to realizing what you can do with the C language (and preprocessor) when put in the right hands. Plus, it's just plain fun! :)

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, this contest is basically "who can turn out the shittiest code that still runs?"

(1) It's for fun.
(2) It's a famous tradition.
(3) There is a great elegance in the entries which win; they are far from shitty.
(4) Chill out.

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[stratjakt]

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.

Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.

So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.

It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.

I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.

As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.

It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.

Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.

But that's another story for another article.

Re:Time to turn in your geek card...

[ComaVN]

Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.

Actually, I think you're the one who's dense, when you think someone from marketing who asks you a straightforward question about your product is supposed to understand a geek-joke.

It's not his job to check or even understand all the technical info. It's (presumably) yours.

Funny, but sickening

[Anonymous Coward]

I always though this contest was funny, but in a dark and sinister way. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at someone else's code and spent hours trying to figure it out. In the real world, it's not funny.
I'm amazed at how someone can acheive such obfuscated code without really trying.

Re:Funny, but sickening

[groomed]

Yes, I suppose, but what does any of that have to do with the IOCCC?

It's just a competition, and like most competitions, the results are fairly pointless outside the intended domain.

Reading your rant is like watching a spectator in the Tour de France yell "learn how to drive a car you idiot!" at Lance Armstrong.

Re:Funny, but sickening

[Urkki]

• With recursion you get 20 function calls with all their associated overhead. A for loop is a much better solution.

Except a properly written recursive function, and a loop end up being exactly the same thing once compiled... Even with a C compiler

Of course anybody putting purposefully obfuscated code into any real software should be shot... All the unpurposefully obfuscated bad code is bad enough, when maintaining it falls on you.

• You know the shit I'm talking about, jamming all kinds of operations into a for() declaration, badly chosen one-letter variable names, etc..

That's not the point IMHO, though admittedly a lot of the stuff is just that without any real content. But the real pearls would still be devious to decipher even if all identifier names were clear, and any unnecessary structural obfuscations were written in more clear way.

• Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.

You need to lighten up. Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo... Nothing wrong with any of that.

Re:Funny, but sickening

[dubious9]

I'd be more impressed with people who can prove they have the discipline to avoid obfuscations.

Have you ever read any of the code? Besides formatting, (you can run stuff through indent), this stuff is *very careful* obfuscation. It's not just nonsensical variable names and lack of comments. It's using constructs in novel ways, and comming up with non-trivial solutions to what are quite often complex problems.

If you can win this contest you know exactly what makes programs hard to read, and thereby in real situations, avoid them. Furthermore, some of the stuff is beautifully arranged and may be faster or more elegant than the easy to read version. It's not a mockery of the language, it's "art in c", and I would happily hire any of the winners as most probably they are masters of the nuances of c.

Transcript

[k4_pacific]

Here's an excerpt from the award ceremony:

winner: I won! I won!
MC: No, you're failing computer science.
winner: [Segmentation fault]

IOCCC? or IOC-C-C?

[TheShadowHawk]

Since the Olympics have just finished and still reasonably fresh on my mind, did anyone else read that as a stuttered IOC-C-C? (International Olympic C-C-Committee)

No? J-J-Just me then?

We get an award, too!

[justkarl]

And the Lifetime Acheivement in Server Destruction Award goes to...Slashdot!!! Congratulations!

Seriously, I can practically smell the server melting from here.

I think we just...

[kkovach]

obfuscated their webserver. :-)

- Kevin

Re:More tricks

[Bastian]

Recursive calls to main(), if handled with interesting tricks like vectored execution and such, can really spice up a program.

If you use the trick of storing all of your data in one huge 'array', try to overlap anything you can get away with overlapping. For example, if you have a constant whose most significant byte is the same as the least significant byte in a string, there's not sense in storing that byte twice.

While not allowed in IOCCC itself, try mixing your C with a language that's even more incomprehensible than C. I had good luck with writing a C program that sent PostScript code to a printer and having all the real work be done in the PostScript code.

For those of you who don't want to wait...

[jtnishi]

For at least one of the entries (Don Yang's, who won the Best Utility category), the code is already up on the internet:

http://uguu.org/src_rinia_c.html

The only reason I can even remember where this entry would be is because he's the one a few years ago that won with that strange Saitou-Aku-Soku-Zan combination program. Yeah, I could find utilities to do what his code can do on many other places, but what better way to show your anime fandom & code fanaticism by running something like this instead. ^_^

You've passed over many good people then...

[rarose]

Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.

At a couple of the companies I've been with we'd have after-hours informal little "Who can optimize this code the most" contests and they were amazingly instructive. They force you to think about solutions in new and creative ways, and to really understand an algorithm or CPU at a far deeper level than a simple straightforward implementation.

And while those obscenely optimized implementations may never get near the shipping product, you always walk away with a far far better grasp of how the shipping code really does work. (And yes, we've discovered bugs by inspection... because the little optimization contest had us questioning assumptions that the shipping code relied upon)

IOCCC mirrors needed

[chongo]

When we release the IOCCC winners, we are going to need more mirrors. If you want to mirror the IOCCC, please send EMail to Simon Cooper at:

mirror-request at ioccc dot org

Please include the following words in the subject of your EMail message:

IOCCC 2004

We will ask you a few questions and provide you with information on how we would prefer you to mirror the site. Please don't start mirroring until we have responded and processed your mirror request. Thanks in advance for your willingness to help.