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.
4.5 KiB
Twenty Third International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Standard IOCCC stuff
View the index.html web page for the given winning entry for information on how
compile the entry 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.
Look at the source and try to figure out what the programs do, and run them with various inputs. If you want to, look at the hints files for spoilers - this year we included most of the information included by the submitter.
Read over the README.md for compile/build issues. Your system may require
certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a #define).
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
We believe you will again be impressed with this year's winning entries.
This year, 2014:
We, the judges, were very surprised by this as many of the multiple authors submitted very different styles of entries.
This year was the second time the IOCCC size tool was used. Rule 2
required that when program source is fed as input to the current IOCCC size
tool, and the IOCCC size tool -i command line option is used, the value
printed should be less than or equal to 2053.
We were pleased to see that abuse of the rules was extended to abuse to the
IOCCC size tool. Matt Zucker, followed by a few
users, were able to discover clever use of certain // comments to perplex the
size tool. The abuse was so bad that the judges released a critical and
mandatory patch to the IOCCC size tool on 2014-09-23.
There were some great entries that did not win. Unfortunately some entries lost because they:
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were too large according the IOCCC size tool and didn't even attempt to justify their excess by a clever abuse of the rules
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depended on a single obfuscation trick
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didn't work as documented
We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit them for the next IOCCC.
There is a risk in submitting an entry that is similar to a well used theme by previous winning entries. Previous authors set a very high bar. A new winning entry must not only compete against submissions from the current year, they must also excel over any similar entries in some particularly impressive way.
On the delay in releasing the winning entries
We apologize on the delay of sending the authors the tarball for them to review. There were some unforeseen events, such as unplanned mandatory business travel, the death of an IOCCC judge's mother, etc. that impacted our planned schedule for building the tarball of this year's winning entries.
During some of these forced delays, we took the time to better automate some of the tools needed to package the source for the winning entries to review and to post the edited entries to the web site. It is our intent that these changes made during those delays will make releasing future winning IOCCC entries a faster procedure.
p.s. The final advice given to Landon by his mom: "Have fun." We recommend following this advice where possible.
Final Comments
Please feel free to send us comments and suggestions about the competition, this README or anything else that you would like to see in future contests.
If you use, distribute or publish these entries in some way, please drop us a line. We enjoy seeing who, where and how the contest is used.
If you have problems with any of the entries, AND YOU HAVE A FIX, please send us the fix (patch file or the entire changed file).
For the latest information on how to contact the IOCCC Judges please visit
For news of the next contest watch:
Copyright and License
Copyright (C) 2014,2024, Landon Curt Noll 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.