The 20th IOCCC Winners Announced

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The 20th IOCCC Winners Announced

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 7, 2012 @07:46AM from the using-only-seven-bytes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest ended on February 5th, 2012, and the list of winners has been announced. According to the page, the source code for all the winning entries 'has not been released yet.' It will be available alongside code from previous years 'in late-February to mid-March.'"

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I feel like... by garrettg84 · 2012-02-07 07:48 · Score: 1

I feel like winning this could put you on the no fly list or some of the other terrorism related lists.....or get you a job....

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-g
1. Re:I feel like... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 07:58 · Score: 1
  
  Two things that no-life people don't do, so if you end up on that list you're fairly sure of that not happening.
2. Re:I feel like... by 91degrees · 2012-02-07 20:55 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  .or get you a job....
  
  Well, pretty certain I've worked with the winner of this.
IOCCC... by Okomokochoko · 2012-02-07 07:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Promoting only the finest in unreadable code since 1984.
1. Re:IOCCC... by betterunixthanunix · 2012-02-07 07:58 · Score: 1
  
  Now now, I think the empty string program was highly readable: it did exactly what it said it did.
  
  --
  Palm trees and 8
2. Re:IOCCC... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 08:11 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Only the period 1984-1987. Then Larry Wall took over.
3. Re:IOCCC... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 14:09 · Score: 1
  
  It took me a good while to figure out your joke. After all, Larry Wall only won twice, and those were in 1986 and 1987.
They could make the contest title more musical... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 08:09 · Score: 0

They could make the contest title more musical by calling it "Rube Goldberg in C".
I love love love this! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 08:11 · Score: 1

I could stare at and examine winning entries for days on end. I really love this competition.
1. Re:I love love love this! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 09:15 · Score: 0
  
  I have decided to work out what some of these do. Firstly for the intellectual challenge, and secondly to give me a deeper insight into the language.
A pity the entries are not available yet by youn · 2012-02-07 08:14 · Score: 1

still love ioccc! glad it is back

--
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p
1. Re:A pity the entries are not available yet by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 08:21 · Score: 0
  
  I wondered if "Aproximate grep" was an intentional pun, but then I saw "Margritte tribute".
  "Ceci n'est pas un programme"?
It's all obfuscated if you're doing it right by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 08:33 · Score: 1, Interesting

Programming used to be fun! Now everything is objects and bloated runtime systems.
Perl by needs2bfree · 2012-02-07 09:06 · Score: 1

I wonder what obfuscated perl would look like...
1. Re:Perl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 09:10 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  As it turns out, it's actually more readable than non-obfuscated perl.
  This is coming from a perl lover :)
2. Re:Perl by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 09:12 · Score: 0
  
  And you didn't search that phrase?
3. Re:Perl by Abreu · 2012-02-07 09:20 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  I wonder what obfuscated perl would look like...
  Slashcode? [ducks!]
  
  --
  No sig for the moment.
4. Re:Perl by DMUTPeregrine · 2012-02-07 10:11 · Score: 1
  
  It would look like "Enterprise" anything.
  
  --
  Not a sentence!
5. Re:Perl by c++0xFF · 2012-02-07 10:12 · Score: 1
  
  /dev/urandom
6. Re:Perl by ledow · 2012-02-07 10:32 · Score: 1
  
  Perl.
What's the point?.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 09:11 · Score: 0

Other than flexing your geek. If you are writing code that looks anything like this in a team environment you'll be fired in a week.
1. Re:What's the point?.... by semi-extrinsic · 2012-02-07 09:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  What's the point of NASCAR? If you drive like that in traffic, you'll be pulled over in a heartbeat.
  (This is my first car analogy on /. Yay!)
  
  --
  for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
2. Re:What's the point?.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 10:45 · Score: 0
  
  >What's the point of NASCAR?
  I read your post, but I'm still not really sure what the point of NASCAR is.
3. Re:What's the point?.... by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2012-02-07 11:07 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Other than flexing your geek.
  Deliberately writing obfuscated code can make you a better coder; you can look at the tricks you're using to make it hard to read and think "I have to make sure never to do anything like that in production code." One of the most valuable programming exercises I ever did, suggested as an "on your own time" project by one of my CS professors, was to write some short but moderately functional program (I think I did a scheduling simulator) without comments and with one-letter variable names, and then look at it again a few months later to see if it made sense. The answer: no, it didn't, and I considered the couple of hours I put into it to be time well-spent.
  
  If you are writing code that looks anything like this in a team environment you'll be fired in a week.
  Ah, idealism! Such a beautiful thing. Hold onto that for as long as you can, before the cruel world shatters your illusions.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
4. Re:What's the point?.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 12:00 · Score: 0
  
  Ya, driving pointlessly in circles will certainly get you pulled over.
  I'm gon turn left, den go straight, den turn left agin. Uh yup.
5. Re:What's the point?.... by semi-extrinsic · 2012-02-07 19:46 · Score: 0
  
  Watch the latest episode of Top Gear. They manage to convince even the British that NASCAR is a good idea (or at least good entertainment).
  
  --
  for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
real obfuscation by lucm · 2012-02-07 09:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

The best way to get real code obfuscation is to outsource VB.Net development to a third-world country. Seeing indexed property calls and casting in lambda expressions in VB.Net is already unsettling, but when the variable names are in a foreign language (or event better: foreign language in all uppercase) it is a treat, especially with random patches of On-Error-Gotos and line numbering.

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lucm, indeed.
1. Re:real obfuscation by cerberusss · 2012-02-08 09:19 · Score: 1
  
  The best way to get real code obfuscation is to outsource VB.Net development to a third-world country. Seeing indexed property calls and casting in lambda expressions in VB.Net is already unsettling, but when the variable names are in a foreign language (or event better: foreign language in all uppercase) it is a treat, especially with random patches of On-Error-Gotos and line numbering.
  Add some random copy/pasting, plenty of unused, undocumented variables, and best of all: a home-brew database structure that is further from normalized than most women.
  
  --
  8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Re:They could make the contest title more musical. by trum4n · 2012-02-07 09:50 · Score: 1

That would obfuscate the mission and message of the competition, and that is clearly not the goal here.
Phobos-Grunt by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 11:47 · Score: 0

BREAKING: The Judges for the 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest decided to award an honorary mention to the Phobos-Grunt programming team.
BREAKING BREAKING: IOCCC Judges retract honorary mention after reading TFA; particularly

Thankfully, this obfuscation turned out to be noise, and the actual failure report issued last week by the Russian space agency (Roscosmos) makes it clear that the fault lies at home -- due to non-space qualified parts being used in some of the electronics circuits.
No entries after 2006? by Nimey · 2012-02-07 13:42 · Score: 1

I know I've seen yearly blurbs for IOCCC here on Slashdot. Why haven't they published source for winners from after 2006?

--
Hail Eris, full of mischief...

E pluribus sanguinem
1. Re:No entries after 2006? by machine321 · 2012-02-07 15:53 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  This was the 20th IOCCC. The 19th was in 2006.
As far as I`m concerned... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-07 18:32 · Score: 0

all high-level languages are nothing more than obfuscated machine code.
No Code Available by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-08 04:14 · Score: 0

"It will be available alongside code from previous years 'in late-February to mid-March."
So, maybe we could've just waited until then before posting about it?
Sigh.