Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

2004 IOCCC Winners Source Code Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the for-the-masochist-in-you dept.

Langly writes "The IOCCC have finally released their source code for 2004. My thoughts goes out to the poor guys that actually wrote this code. Reader discretion is advised." Every time I see an obfuscated code contest, I wonder if 'Winner' is the right word to describe the victor ;)

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great article summaries lately... by Scarblac · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And best of all, that ridiculous code is REALLY AMAZINGLY POWERFUL in many cases.

    I only looked at the first entry, anonymous.c. It's 47 utterly incomprehensible lines. What it does is convert text into one of Tolkien's Elvish fonts - and the result looks rather nice, for such a tiny C program (that doesn't use any libraries apart from stdlib, stdio and string).

    I took the example from the hint file, pasted only the first half ("ash nazg durhbatuluhk, ash nazg gimbatul") and created a picture, then converted it to PNG with ImageMagick. The result is here. I think that's rather good.

    And that's just the first one of this year. Many of the entries of earlier years were stunning.

    --
    I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
  2. Re:Simple trick for beginners by mopslik · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Bah, why use "A" and "B" when "I" (capital i) will do the trick even better?

    Examples:
    I1I1 (eye one eye one)
    IlIl (eye ell eye ell)
    lIll (ell eye ell ell)
    etc.
  3. Size does matter! by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why not just differentiate by varying the length of the names?

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxx = xxxxxxxxxxxx + xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx / xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;

    Makes sense, doesn't it? And it works with every letter of the alphabet too!

    --
    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  4. Re:clueless submitters by willisachimp · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually, I work with the guy who wrote the 'gavin' (the best of show this year), and know for a fact that the final version you see is *very* similar to his development version. Pretty much the only difference is shorter, meaningless variable names and running it through indent (thus giving no information in the indentation, by using a standard indentation tool)

    What you see is how he wrote it - he really is that sick :-D

    I'm so glad he doesn't write like this when he's working. Well, not often, anyway.