Cody Boone Ferguson
e6040e083c
It should be pointed out that there are a few inconsistencies as noted below. In some years the title of entries that were explicitly listed were linked to but as the README.md files no longer have the title it was not as easy to locate the title (I could go back in archive/historic and I did in some cases but I was trying to hurry this up to close #3). It's most likely that some have backticks surrounding certain words like gcc or something else but not in all files. An example that might be there is '#define'. Some wording is different. Usually this is due to the original wording which I did not think was good to change. There might be other cases that were missed as well. One thing is that comes to mind is that in some README.md files it refers to the Makefile to check for build instructions, in others it refers to the index.html file and in some it refers to both. But the index.html has how to build so they should probably all say index.html and not refer to the Makefile. This was also done in a rush. There might be other inconsistencies or things that might want to be fixed but whether it's worth it given is unclear at this time. It can be argued that the reference to the Makefiles for build instructions is a historical comment to keep there as an example of why not to change it. There were other things I noticed that I could not address or did not feel were necessary but with this commit an important task is can likely be considered done unless it is decided that some of these should be fixed or if looking at the rendered output there is a problem.
Sixteenth International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Standard IOCCC stuff
View the index.html web page for the given winning entry for information on how
on how to compile it and how to run the winning program.
Look at the winning source and try to figure how it does what it does!
You may then wish to look at the Author's remarks for even more details.
The IOCCC has a web site and now has a number of international mirrors. The primary site can be found at www.ioccc.org.
Use make to compile entries. It is possible that on non-Unix / non-Linux
systems the Makefile needs to be changed. See the Makefile for details.
Read over the Makefile for compile/build issues. Your system may
require certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a
#define i.e. the -D flag).
Some ANSI C compilers are not quite as good as they should be. If yours is lacking, you may need to compile using gcc instead of your local compiler.
Remarks on some of the entries
There were some outstanding entries that did not win. Unfortunately some very good entries lost because they:
- depended too much on non-portable side effects in expressions;
- depended too much on a particular byte order;
- required the use of a special script, data file or pseudo-machine language that was not supplied with the entry.
We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit them for the next IOCCC.
We believe you will be impressed with this year's winning entries The Best of Show is a fine example of obfuscation. But don't ignore the other entries! There are games, programs that speak, ones that compile code and one that might run binaries you already have.
The Best/Worst Abuse of the Rules is technically allowed by the rules. This year we awarded it again, but don't assume you can get away with using the same technique next time ... :-)
This year there were several repeat authors. This is understating the achievement a little - one person has won 8 times before! (Please note that judging is done completely anonymously.)
Why has it taken so long to post the winning source?
This is somewhat my (Simon Cooper's) fault. I do apologize to the IOCCC community for this! Judging does take quite a lot of time, and I over-committed myself several times this year. Without divulging too much, we do look at and work out what every entry does.
Final Comments
Please send us comments and suggestions what we have expressed above. Also include anything else that you would like to see in future contests. Send such email to:
questions@ioccc.org
IMPORTANT NOTE: The email addresses found above are for historical purposes only, and should not be used today. See contact.html for up to date contact details as well as details on how to provide fixes to any of the entries. See also the IOCCC FAQ for addition information on the IOCCC.
Copyright and License
Copyright (c) 2001,2002,2023, Landon Curt Noll, Peter Seebach and Leonid A. Broukhis, All Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. If you do use this work in some form, the IOCCC judges would appreciate (but does not require) if you were to send us a note about your use.