IOCCC 2006 is now open

leob writes "The 19th International Obfuscated C Code Contest opened one minute before the New Year to qualify for the 2006 designation. Entries accepted until the end of February. Start writing and submitting your entries now!"

Isn't it time for a CLEAR code contest?

[dpbsmith]

A contestant would submit a piece of code together with the specification of what the code was supposed to do, but no other documentation.

The judges would propose a straightforward change in the specification.

The code and the revised specification would be given to an impartial panel of a hundred programmers, selected at random from the ranks of people working for a living writing code. Each of them would be asked to modify the code to meet the revised spec. They would also be instructed to fix any bugs they noticed in the code they were given. The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code.

The winner would be the contestant whose code, after being modified by other programmers, passed the largest number of SQA tests.

(And, yes, SQA failures due to unfixed bugs in the original code would count against the contestant).

 

Re:A good one for a good programmer...

[nacturation]

That's probably a good way to lose since creativity is one of the key factors, not just plain illegibility. Take, for example, this program (one of my all-time favorites) which prints out the value of pi:

http://www0.us.ioccc.org/1988/westley.c [ioccc.org]

Or this one which, when compiled and run, prints out another character as program source. You compile the output to that, run it and it outputs another character as program source. You compile that, and you get back the original program's source:

http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2000/dhyang.c [ioccc.org]

And given the space constraints, your program should be quite clever and compact itself even before you try and obfuscate it.