The 21st IOCCC Has Been Announced

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The 21st IOCCC Has Been Announced

Posted by timothy on Monday July 23, 2012 @12:31AM from the in-a-roundabout-way-naturally dept.

leob writes "As promised at the end of the 20th IOCCC earlier this year, the 21st International Obfuscated C Code Contest will accept entries from 2012-Aug-15 03:14:15 UTC to 2012-Sep-14 09:26:53 UTC. The earliest announcement about the next contest was on Twitter on July 13, giving the interested parties more than 2 months to polish their entries."

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GREAT NEWS !! I MISSED THE 20TH !! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 00:38 · Score: 0

I'm going to this one !!
1. Re:GREAT NEWS !! I MISSED THE 20TH !! by azalin · 2012-07-23 02:19 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  There are few things that are more NERD than entering (or actually winning) a contest like this. It requires creativity, programming skills, is hard to do, of very limited actual use and only a handful people will appreciate it. Have fun!
Yeah, but when is the Underhanded C Contest by Rei · 2012-07-23 00:45 · Score: 2

...coming back? Just my luck that the first year I entered it, it died... :P

--
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
1. Re:Yeah, but when is the Underhanded C Contest by stderr_dk · 2012-07-23 01:20 · Score: 1
  
  ...coming back? Just my luck that the first year I entered it, it died... :P
  You killed it! Damn you and your underhanded C code!
  
  --
  alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
2. Re:Yeah, but when is the Underhanded C Contest by Rei · 2012-07-23 01:49 · Score: 2
  
  Hehehe, you got me ;)
  It's actually a really fun contest to take part in, first selecting what bug or group of bugs you want to exploit, and then how you want to hide them. the contest last year was to make it so that if a baggage handler typed a special but inconspicuous comment on the bag, it'd reroute the bag to some mean location. My "bug" was that the user's comment was stored in a struct in a string of a specific length but there was no bounds checking, so their comment string could overwrite the destination (I made it look like there was bounds checking, but the code was broken). The destination was right after the comment string, so whatever three characters in the comment were immediately after the comment limit (which could just be in the middle of a word in an innocent-looking comment) became the destination airport code.
  
  --
  "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
3. Re:Yeah, but when is the Underhanded C Contest by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 05:28 · Score: 0
  
  I love the underhanded C contest. There are so many examples from that where I went "There it is!" immediately; others had step-by-step write-ups that explained the code's execution and I still had to read it more than twice to get the cascade of problems that result in the underhandedness.
C is outdated by GhigoRenzulli · 2012-07-23 00:48 · Score: 1, Troll

How long for the International Obfuscated Cobol Code Contest? Wait... forget it.
1. Re:C is outdated by Hyperhaplo · 2012-07-23 01:57 · Score: 1
  
  It's still on.. and has been for over 4 decades.. do try to keep up ..
  
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IOC++CC and IOPERLCC etc by vlm · 2012-07-23 00:49 · Score: 1

insert standard joke about no need for a IOC++CC because C++ is inherently obfuscated. And Perl.

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
1. Re:IOC++CC and IOPERLCC etc by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 01:26 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  This just in: International Legible Perl Contest Announced!
  Extra points for using all of perl's obscure features and alternate syntaxes while still keeping things readable and even beautiful!
2. Re:IOC++CC and IOPERLCC etc by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · 2012-07-23 01:52 · Score: 1
  
  Fun fact: I did that as my first professional program using libraries. It was ripped apart in code review because of the use of modules was innefficeint and not "zen like" enough.
  
  --
  Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Could extend this to natural languages. by Rei · 2012-07-23 01:09 · Score: 3, Funny

Along the lines of the grammatically-correct sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

--
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
1. Re:Could extend this to natural languages. by hvm2hvm · 2012-07-23 01:17 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Not a good idea, a contest like that would only make language arts students think their college degree will be useful for something...
  
  --
  ics
2. Re:Could extend this to natural languages. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 02:49 · Score: 0
  
  More the opposite (and not an actual contest), but there is Language Log's Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding. Search for "the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding" (in quotes) for more instances.
3. Re:Could extend this to natural languages. by subreality · 2012-07-23 04:27 · Score: 1
  
  There is an entire profession for this: Lawyers.
4. Re:Could extend this to natural languages. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 05:38 · Score: 0
  
  One of my friends graduated form law school and saw a posting on his school's website for a "translator," J.D. required. The posting was to basically read contracts, translate them into plain English for the PHB and then when they came up with a response, to translate it into the most complicated language possible. He took a screening test for that position. He and I ran it through the Flesch-Kincaid and it resulted in an almost non-existent score.
They're making it too easy by dkleinsc · 2012-07-23 01:35 · Score: 1

They should have made the announcement in the form of a crazy-looking C program in the shape of a smiley face that prints out the entire contest rules, but has a syntax error somewhere that causes a seg fault.

--
I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
1. Re:They're making it too easy by jimicus · 2012-07-23 03:02 · Score: 1
  
  Pretty sure one of the rules of the IOCCC is that code submitted must compile and execute without dying horribly.
2. Re:They're making it too easy by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-23 07:39 · Score: 0
  
  Potential winner in worst abuse of the rules: a program that has an intentional bug making it always exit successfully, while with the bug fixed it returns the result of a calculation in the signal it raises.
Been waiting by elfprince13 · 2012-07-23 01:53 · Score: 1

Been waiting for this, I actually have something fun/abusive in mind for this year, that I'm looking forward to implementing, "polishing", and submitting.
Significance of the times by alhirzel · 2012-07-23 11:35 · Score: 2

What is the significance of the end time of the competition? With the first being pi it would surprise me if the end time were random...
1. Re:Significance of the times by leob · 2012-07-23 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  pi = 3.141592653...