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Winners of the 18th IOCCC

Posted by Zonk on from the say-that-five-times-fast dept.

achowe writes "The winners of the 18th International Obfuscated C Code Contest have been announced. This years winners include a 'Commodore PET emulator', 'Sound generation with SDL audio', and a 'Text WWW Browser'."

6 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. No Source Code? by geomon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's with that?

    Seriously though, why post the results of a competition regarding obfuscated source code if we are unable to view the entries ourselves? Seem the announcement was a bit of a let down if all we get to see is a couple of output files from some of the entries.

    Sigh... I miss the old days when awards announcements didn't have a trailer.

    --
    "Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
  2. My favorite by nizo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My favorite from years past is this one by smr which claims to be the smallest self replicating program.

    --
    I Am My Own Worst Enemy
  3. Obfuscated code compiler? by Doppler00 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't the ultimate obfuscation be to write an obfuscation compiler that retranslates the C code into obfuscated code, and then run that compiler against its own source code? Repeat several hundred times. I couldn't imagine the resulting code to ever be understandable.

    1. Re:Obfuscated code compiler? by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Wouldn't the ultimate obfuscation be to write an obfuscation compiler that retranslates the C code into obfuscated code, and then run that compiler against its own source code? Repeat several hundred times. I couldn't imagine the resulting code to ever be understandable.

      If you look back through old winners, you'll find one that sort of did that: it was a program that could reverse text or do ROT13 on text, or (IIRC) both.

      The trick was that you could run it on its own source code (in any mode) and produce a program that did the same thing, using a different algorithm each way, no less. While all the versions were quite heinous, my recollection is that ROT13 and reversal did manage to make it marginally worse.

      Unfortunately, unless my memory serves even worse than usual tonight, you need a fairly ancient compiler to make it compile at all (and C++ compilers need not apply -- I'm pretty sure it depends on undeclared functions, among other things).

      --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

      --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
    2. Re:Obfuscated code compiler? by Coryoth · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Perl, of course, is the ideal language for such a thing, and you would be looking for Acme::Smirch, which does a fabulous job of taking any perl script and producing a perfectly functional perl script that uses no alphanumeric characters or whitespace. The results of applying smirch to the smirch module are... well they're impossible to get past the lameness filter, but I think it is safe to say that it is fairly obfuscated.

      Jedidiah.

      --
      Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
  4. Re:Source Code Published by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not source code. It's just code. "Source code" is defined as the prefered form of the program for making modifications. Obviously this aint it.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.