ioccc/1993/schnitzi

Obfuscated Intelligence Award:

Mark Schnitzius
1700 Woodbury Rd. #1208
Orlando, FL 32828
USA
http://computronium.org/ioccc.html

To build:

    make all

Cody Boone Ferguson made this use fgets() not gets() to make it safer and to prevent a warning with linking or at runtime. Thank you Cody for your assistance!

To run:

    ./schnitzi file

where:

    file	a file containing some text

NOTE: this entry will segfault if the file cannot be opened.

Try:

    ./schnitzi schnitzi.info
    # ask some questions suggested by the author, noted below

We also suggest you ask the program:

    Who is Mark Schnitzus?

Notice how it still manages to answer the question despite there being an intentional spelling error there.

Try feeding the program source to the program and ask both:

What is cat ?
What is cat?

Judges' remarks:

After this program prints the contents of 'file', ask it some questions related to the text.

The author suggests the following questions when using schnitzi.info:

Who is Mark Schnitzius?
What exactly does this program do?
What language is it written in?
Has the Loch Ness monster really been captured?
Who was Hitler?
Were the NASA moon landings faked?
Is it true that Elvis is alive?
Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?

We suggest you try using the body (minus the header and signature line) of a Usenet article. You might want to try something from alt.flame. :-)

NOTE: If you have a ' in the question this entry may fail.

NOTE: The author may also be contacted at: marks@aldrin.ksc.nasa.gov.

Author's remarks:

I wanted to write a program that would read in a text file in natural language (such as English) and answer questions about that text file. I thought this might be a complicated task, and I was right -- it took me over 800 bytes. Of course, it doesn't always work, but that's AI for you.

This program accepts the name of a text file as the first parameter. For example, to run it on the supplied data file called 'info' you would type ./schnitzi info. It echoes the file, then gives you a prompt where you may type in questions about that text. The more words you use which are actually present in the text file, the better results you get. You'll need to hit ctrl-c to break out of the program. Just hitting return at the prompt will reprint the paragraph.

If you're curious as to how it works, I guess you could feed in the source as the input file and ask "How does this work?" at the prompt, but I'm not guaranteeing any results...

Compilation notes:

• The use of 'strcasecmp' may be non-standard. 'strcmp' can be substituted for it, with a slight performance penalty.

• This program depends on the first command-line parameter, typically called argv[0], to hold the name of the executable. It is my understanding that this property of argv[0] is not guaranteed on some systems.

Obfuscation:

• It uses a hidden string to test for punctuation.

• The layout, variable names, and expression format have been chosen in such a way as to cause visual confusion.

• It uses uses external 'system' calls to echo the text file and break up the question into individual words with a recursive call.

• It uses a clever hack to simulate artificial intelligence.

The text for the info file, by the way, consists largely of headlines from the Weekly World News.

Copyright and CC BY-SA 4.0 License:

This file is Copyright (c) 2023 by Landon Curt Noll. All Rights Reserved. You are free to share and adapt this file under the terms of this license:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/