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IOCCC Winners Announced
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Aug 30, 2004 08:35 AM
from the begin-the-headache dept.
from the begin-the-headache dept.
Arachn1d writes "The IOCCC has finally announced the winners of the 2004 contest.
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."
With winners this year including a mini-OS and a ray-tracer, the submissions should be interesting indeed - if you can make sense of them. According to the page, the actual code for the winners should be up mid-october."
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Obfuscation (Score:5, Informative)
It's all about how to obfuscate [demon.nl] baby!
Re:Obfuscation (Score:5, Interesting)
http://p-nand-q.com/python/lambdaizing_quicksort.
Parent
Re:Obfuscation (Score:4, Informative)
Thwart Reverse Engineering of Your Visual Basic
Parent
Re:Obfuscation (Score:4, Informative)
How to obfuscate in copious detail.
How to write unmaintainable code [mindprod.com]
Parent
Re:Obfuscation (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Obfuscation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More tricks (Score:5, Interesting)
If you use the trick of storing all of your data in one huge 'array', try to overlap anything you can get away with overlapping. For example, if you have a constant whose most significant byte is the same as the least significant byte in a string, there's not sense in storing that byte twice.
While not allowed in IOCCC itself, try mixing your C with a language that's even more incomprehensible than C. I had good luck with writing a C program that sent PostScript code to a printer and having all the real work be done in the PostScript code.
Parent
Umm (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, a sentence or two of information in the submissions doesn't hurt.
Re:Umm (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe that's the whole point. Everything (including the article) is well... obfuscated.
Parent
Re:Umm (Score:3, Funny)
Apparently even the web site is obfuscated now.
Re:Umm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:5, Funny)
Please hand in your Geek membership card on your way out. Thank you.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:5, Insightful)
To be able to make something like that, you need to be able to understand the language well, which is a good thing.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:4, Funny)
I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.
Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.
So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.
It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.
I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.
As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.
It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.
Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.
But that's another story for another article.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I think you're the one who's dense, when you think someone from marketing who asks you a straightforward question about your product is supposed to understand a geek-joke.
It's not his job to check or even understand all the technical info. It's (presumably) yours.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:3, Informative)
determining a leap year [wikipedia.org] is more than just having it be divisible evenly by 4: The Gregorian calendar adds an extra day to February, making it 29 days long, in years divisible by 4, excepting years divisible by 100, but including year
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:4, Insightful)
(1) It's for fun.
(2) It's a famous tradition.
(3) There is a great elegance in the entries which win; they are far from shitty.
(4) Chill out.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway, this is not merely "bad code," in the sense that an idiot might program this stuff. This is the sort of code you can only attain when you actively aim for it. You really need to know the language well to know how to fuck with it so thoroughly.
Parent
Re:Time to turn in your geek card... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they don't know, hey, it says you won a fairly well-known programming contenst.
Parent
Windows CE? (Score:5, Funny)
Much better than the last 2 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course it looks like those extra 2 years paid off. This year's winners look very interesting.
If the IOCCC is like the IOC (Score:5, Funny)
Let me be the first to say... (Score:3, Funny)
C0N6R47UL4710N5 W1NN3RZZ!
I can smell the smoke from here... (Score:5, Informative)
Additional Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Site content (Score:5, Informative)
Here are the names and categories for the winners of the 17th IOCCC. The source code has not been released yet. The winners have been notified by EMail. They will be given a chance to review the write-up of their entry. Once this process is complete the source code will be made available on the winning entries web page. We anticipate that this will be in mid-October.
The winners are,
* Best of Show
Gavin Barraclough - Mini-OS
Manchester, UK
screenshot
* Best One-Liner
Eryk Kopczynski - OCR of 8, 9, 10 and 11
Warszawa, Poland
* Best Utility
Don Yang - A CRC inserter
Covina, California, USA
* Best Non-Use of Curses
Mark Schnitzius - Editor animation
Singapore
* Best X11 Game
Daniel Vik - X Windows car racing game
La Jolla, California, USA
screenshot
* Best use of "Precious" Lines
Anonymous - Rendering of a stroked font
Singapore
screenshot
* Best Abuse of CPP
Daniel Vik - Calculates prime numbers using only CPP
La Jolla, California, USA
* Best Calculated Risk
Brent Burley - A Poker game
Burbank, California, USA
* Best use of Vision
Nick Johnson - Curses maze displayer/navigator with only line-of-sight visibility
Christchurch, New Zealand
* Best Font Engine
Jeff Newbern - Renders arbitary bitmapped fonts
Springwood, Queensland, Australia
* Most Functional Output
Jonathan Hoyle - Curses based polynomial graphing with auto-scale
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
* Best use of Light and Spheres
Anders Gavare - A ray tracer
Gothenburg, Sweden
screenshot
* Best Abuse of Indentation
Stephen Sykes - Space/tab/linefeed steganography
Helsinki, Finland
* Best Abuse of the Guidelines
Anthony Howe - A CGI capable HTTP server
Cannes, France
* Best Abuse of the Periodic Table
John Dalbec - Conway's look'n'say sequence split into elements
Canfield, Ohio, USA
Mirrors (Score:5, Informative)
Asia
* http://www.tw.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org] - Hsin-Chu, Taiwan (24 48' N 120 59' E)
* Australia and other Pacific http://www.au.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org] - Sydney, Australia (34 0' S 151 0' E)
Europe
* http://www.de.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org] - Hamburg, Germany (53 33' N 10 2' E)
* http://www.es.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org] - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)
* http://www.gr.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org] - Athens, Greece (38 00' N 23 44' E)
* North America www0.us.ioccc.org [slashdot.org] - Sunnyvale California, US (37 22' N 122 02' W)
* www1.us.ioccc.org [slashdot.org] - Saint Paul, Minnesota US (44 57' N 93 06' W)
Funny, but sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm amazed at how someone can acheive such obfuscated code without really trying.
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not amazed at all - I pay special attention to my code so that someone else could come in and use it. That doesn't mean they'll be able to just step in and understand everything, it'll be hard no matter what. But if I didn't try, I think everything I made would be unusable by anyone else. In my mind that makes the code worth very little - it is the ability to reuse code that makes it valuable. I've debugged or added f
/*Why did I do this*/ (Score:3, Interesting)
This was on an embedded system where using one 16 bit int instead of 16 8-bit chars to hold the flags resulted in a vital savings of memory.
missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone can write unreadable code.
It takes an artist to write code that is both unreadable and beautiful at the same time.
If your entry isn't beautiful, you're just a bad programmer.
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of the IOCCC is to demonstrate how ridiculously unreadable C programs can get if you really try. And if you don't think writing a raytracer or whatever within the guidelines set in the competition rules is worthy of admiration then you've never picked up a C compiler in your life.
I see you have a job that requires you to read CVs and presumably hire people. Please tell us which company this is so we can avoid this mi
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever read any of the code? Besides formatting, (you can run stuff through indent), this stuff is *very careful* obfuscation. It's not just nonsensical variable names and lack of comments. It's using constructs in novel ways, and comming up with non-trivial solutions to what are quite often complex problems.
If you can win this contest you know exactly what makes programs hard to read, and thereby in real situations, avoid them. Furthermore, some of the stuff is beautifully arranged and may be faster or more elegant than the easy to read version. It's not a mockery of the language, it's "art in c", and I would happily hire any of the winners as most probably they are masters of the nuances of c.
Parent
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a competition, and like most competitions, the results are fairly pointless outside the intended domain.
Reading your rant is like watching a spectator in the Tour de France yell "learn how to drive a car you idiot!" at Lance Armstrong.
Parent
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:5, Insightful)
Except a properly written recursive function, and a loop end up being exactly the same thing once compiled... Even with a C compiler
Of course anybody putting purposefully obfuscated code into any real software should be shot... All the unpurposefully obfuscated bad code is bad enough, when maintaining it falls on you.
That's not the point IMHO, though admittedly a lot of the stuff is just that without any real content. But the real pearls would still be devious to decipher even if all identifier names were clear, and any unnecessary structural obfuscations were written in more clear way.
You need to lighten up. Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo... Nothing wrong with any of that.
Parent
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:3, Informative)
The C standard doesn't guarantee optimization tail-recursion; and while gcc does it (to a limited extent), many compilers do not.
Additionally, it's sometimes important to compile your code without any optimization during debugging.
Relying on tail recursion is really only possible in languages where the standard guarantees support.
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, here [ioccc.org] is the explanation.
Parent
You've passed over many good people then... (Score:5, Insightful)
At a couple of the companies I've been with we'd have after-hours informal little "Who can optimize this code the most" contests and they were amazingly instructive. They force you to think about solutions in new and creative ways, and to really understand an algorithm or CPU at a far deeper level than a simple straightforward implementation.
And while those obscenely optimized implementations may never get near the shipping product, you always walk away with a far far better grasp of how the shipping code really does work. (And yes, we've discovered bugs by inspection... because the little optimization contest had us questioning assumptions that the shipping code relied upon)
Parent
Re:Funny, but sickening (Score:3, Informative)
Transcript (Score:5, Funny)
winner: I won! I won!
MC: No, you're failing computer science.
winner: [Segmentation fault]
IOCCC? or IOC-C-C? (Score:4, Funny)
Since the Olympics have just finished and still reasonably fresh on my mind, did anyone else read that as a stuttered IOC-C-C? (International Olympic C-C-Committee)
No? J-J-Just me then?
Bumper Sticker (Score:4, Funny)
"Eschew Obfuscation"
We get an award, too! (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, I can practically smell the server melting from here.
I think we just... (Score:4, Funny)
- Kevin
For those of you who don't want to wait... (Score:5, Informative)
http://uguu.org/src_rinia_c.html [uguu.org]
The only reason I can even remember where this entry would be is because he's the one a few years ago that won with that strange Saitou-Aku-Soku-Zan combination program. Yeah, I could find utilities to do what his code can do on many other places, but what better way to show your anime fandom & code fanaticism by running something like this instead. ^_^
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
All prize money for the latest IOCCC have been used up for bandwidth after a %^&*@#@%#^% ( obfuscated ) slashdot effect hit the site soon after results were published. We are sorry for the winners...
IOCCC mirrors needed (Score:5, Informative)
Please include the following words in the subject of your EMail message:
We will ask you a few questions and provide you with information on how we would prefer you to mirror the site. Please don't start mirroring until we have responded and processed your mirror request. Thanks in advance for your willingness to help.