Winners of the 18th IOCCC

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'."

Comments

No Source Code?

[geomon]

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.

Re:No Source Code?

[nizo]

Maybe they are really available but are difficult to see? That would be the theme of the contest after all. Time to start digging through the html on the site!

Re:No Source Code?

[geomon]

Maybe they are really available but are difficult to see?

Wow! Now THAT'S a *contest*!

Re:No Source Code?

[graveyhead]

WTF?

Right at the top of the page it says:

"The source code has not been released yet. The winners will be notified by EMail soon. 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-December."

Can I buy some pot from these moderators and the parent poster?

Re:No Source Code?

[redink1]

Obfuscation... You fear to go into those minds. The coders delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Programming... shadow and flame.

Re:No Source Code?

[jtorkbob]

True, they do propose a time at which they WILL give us the source, but it's still a nasty, nasty tease. I kind of expected to be able to see the code. "Free donuts in the break room." (minutes pass) "I see no donuts." "I didn't mean *right now*!"

Re:No Source Code?

[jtorkbob]

Also, as I'm leading to, it would be extremely hard to read

You mean like a huge block of text with no line breaks?

Re:No Source Code?

[panth0r]

that
is
exactly
what
i
am
talking
about

Re:No Source Code?

[IdahoEv]

I can't wait until the code is out! I'm really excited by this one:

Most superfluous output

Francois Boutines - XML Voronoi diagrams generator
Toulouse, France

I've been wanting to write a voronoi generator for a game-map-development project (maps for a Risk clone). But I could only find mathematical definitions, not any good code that clearly laid out the algorithm. Hopefully this program will be nice and clear (and well-documented!) so that I can reproduce the algorithm from it.

Re:No Source Code?

[slavemowgli]

RTFA. It quite clearly states that the source will be released later this year after the participants have been consulted.

Re:No Source Code?

[sethml]

Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on Voronoi diagrams.

And if you check out the image attached to the article, you'll find a remarkably obfuscated and short chunk of code to generate a random Voronoi diagram image. I bet this is the precursor to the winning code submitted to the IOCCC.

Re:No Source Code?

[isometrick]

Not if they do it by hand.

Re:No Source Code?

[Chosen Reject]

#include "stdio.h"
#define SACRED Count[11] = a;Count[14] = a;Count[28] = a;
#define FOR Count[1] = 32;Count[15] = 32;Count[18] = 97;
#define THE Count[7] = 0x20;Count[12] = ' ';Count[23] = 0x20;
#define LOVE Count[26] = 0x61;Count[3] = count;Count[9] = count;
#define OF Count[5] = weird;Count[2] = orange;Count[21] = count;
#define ALL Count[8] = orange;Count[17] = count;Count[22] = time3;
#define THAT Count[25] = time3;Count[27] = weird;Count[19] = orange;
#define IS Count[16] = time_3;Count[20] = 131 % 33;Count[0] = monkey_jar;
#define HOLY Count[24] = monkey_Jar;Count[6] = oh_holy_crap;Count[4] = mangledMuttFace;
#define AND Count[10] = mangledMuttFace;Count[13] = mangledMuttFace;Count[29] = (holy_crap == oh_holy_crap);
#define OH char mangledMuttFace = 105;char oh_holy_crap = 107;char monkey_Jar = 109;char holy_crap = 110;char monkey_jar = 73;char Count[' ' - 2];char orange = 116;char time_3 = 119;char count = 104;char weird = 110;char time3 = 101;char a = 115;

int main()
{
        OH FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND SACRED
        printf("%s \n", Count);

        return 0;
}

Re:No Source Code?

[DJH47]

This compiles to a program which prints to standard output:

"I think this is what he means"

Re:No Source Code?

[achowe]

Well the judges of the IOCCC always make the announcements of the winners first to the public often at some event (this year it was the Vintage Computer Festival), then the judges notify the winners, soon after they send the winners the source tar ball with the judges' write-ups. The winners test the tar ball build process for their code and others, correct any serious mistakes with packaging, provide feedback on the comments, and sometimes they are allowed to correct serious bugs in their entries normally for portability. After that is all done, about a month or so later the the official tar ball is released to the public. As mentioned in the IOCCC annoucement of the winners, they expect to have the tar ball ready for mid-December.

Re:No Source Code?

[Zapper]

It also phones home and gets you owned... talk about obfuscated.

Re:No Source Code?

[Soruk]

This is the Interntional Obfuscated C Code Contest, not the Butt Ugly Perl Contest. How about:
echo 'Guvf vf gur vagreangvbany BOSHFPNGRQ P pbqr pbagrkg fb vgf cerggl zhpu n tvira gung gur pbqr jvyy ABG or ernqnoyr' | tr \[a-zA-Z] \[n-za-mN-ZA-M]

My favorite

[nizo]

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

Re:My favorite

[John Courtland]

Too bad the server can't self replicate to handle the load...

Re:My favorite

[milimetric]

damn you moderators for moding this interesting instead of funny. It would have saved me the 10 minute load time to find out the file is blank. Pretty funny though.

Re:My favorite

[WWWWolf]

I think Make just gets hung on pondering dependencies or something.

Anyway, the makefile for that entry just does something along the lines of "mv smr.c smr; chmod +x smr". It's an empty file. *NIXes have no problem executing empty files (producing nothing on stdout, so yes, it produces its own source), not sure about Windowses. =)

GCC doesn't seem to like this file - or actually, it *compiles* all right (with -c, it produces an object file with no problems), it just doesn't *link* the executable (undefined reference to `main').

Re:My favorite

[nizo]

You know a server is slashdotted when it takes 10 minutes to load an empty file.

The winning entry...

[slapout]

... submits fake stories to slashdot!

Mirrors

[Ween]

http://stone.newton.cam.ac.uk/mirrors/IOCCC/www1.u s.ioccc.org/

of which lists:
            Antarctica
            none yet :-)

            Africa
            none

            Asia
            none

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

            Europe
        * www.es.ioccc.org - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)

            Extraterrestrial
            SETI is looking for some sites :-)

        * 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)

            South America
            none

Coral Cache

[i_finally_got_an_acc]

The Coral Cache still works.

Winners of the 18th IOCCC

Now, I sit back and watch the karma roll in. Right? Please??

Source Code Published

[sr180]

The source code is usually published a month or two after the winners are announced. I dont know why, but this is typical.

Dont worry, most of us wont be able to read the source code anyway.

Re:Source Code Published

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Source Code Published

[grammar fascist]

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.

Does this mean the authors can't release this code under the GPL?

Or would that disqualify way too much Perl?

And in a related story...

[anandamide]

IOCCC wins First Prize in this year's 'Obfuscated Web Server' competition! Way to go, fellas!

Surprise Winner!

[Anonymous Coward]

"And out of nowhere, Sony Computer Entertainment & First 4 Internet ranked first with their obfuscated rootkit!"

Hee hee.

[bigtallmofo]

WTF?...
Can I buy some pot from these moderators and the parent poster?

I love how on Slashdot a minor misunderstanding warrants the indignation of "WTF?" followed by an accusation of drug use.

I imagine in real life that you're much more pleasant. Perhaps in such a circumstance you would have said something along the lines of, "You may have missed that they will be releasing the source code, they just haven't done it yet."

Re:Hee hee.

[grammar fascist]

I imagine in real life that you're much more pleasant. Perhaps in such a circumstance you would have said something along the lines of, "You may have missed that they will be releasing the source code, they just haven't done it yet."

It's probably more along the lines of, "You may have missed that they will be releasing the source code, they just haven't done it yet. Can I buy some pot?"

Wait a second..

[The OPTiCIAN]

All perl code is obfuscated, you insensitive clod!!

Re:Wait a second..

[Phroggy]

No it isn't!

Best contest EVER!

[markild]

This probably the best programming contest there is.

Seriously. Obfuscated code!

Though I have though about how the writing process is. Do they like first write then program, then try to obfuscate the code. I can't be very easy to write a complex (well more or less) program directly obfuscated.
"Oh, I got a seg fault.That must be because the code reads "}[fa) not "}[fb) as it should read!"

Obfuscated code compiler?

[Doppler00]

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.

Re:Obfuscated code compiler?

[Jerry Coffin]

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.

Re:Obfuscated code compiler?

[Coryoth]

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.

Re:Obfuscated code compiler?

[ipfwadm]

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.

So... it looks like Perl?

With a glass of rum in hand...

[lord_nimula]

Slicing through an entry's veil of obfuscation and peering inside is truly a challenge--and far more fun than most crosswords. If you haven't tried, I highly recommend it.

--Lord Nimula

Parenthesis O.o

[Spy der Mann]

# Best use of parenthesis

        Michael Ash - Self-printing LISP interpreter
        USA

E(E(E(E(E(E(E(Ew)w)w)w)w)w)w)

Obfuscated C++ contest was cancelled...

[Viol8]

..due to contestants simply entering source code from their work.