Fourteenth 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.

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.

The IOCCC has an official home page: www.ioccc.org.

New Judges

Larry Bassel is now a graduate student in number theory at UC San Diego. Barbara Frezza also went to San Diego to enter into law school at the same time. Her cooking in the role of official chef was sorely missed. Both Larry and Barbara have taken important new steps in their lives. We wish them the best.

Landon was unable to contact Sriram Srinivasan at the start of the 1998 IOCCC season. Having not heard from Sriram, Landon put out a call for new IOCCC judges. A number of excellent people applied.

Landon selected Leonid A. Broukhis, a two time IOCCC winning author, as a co-judge. Landon and Leo together selected Jeremy Horn and Peter Seebach. The four judges together worked thru-out the 1998 IOCCC season.

2023 note about judges:

The number of judges now is only 2, Landon Curt Noll and Leonid A. Broukhis.

Remarks on some of the entries

This year, Jens Schweikhardt won 3 times … AGAIN! He is the only person who was able to do this, let alone do it in two contests in a row. Bas de Bakker and David Lowe won twice this year as well.

As we stated in the guidelines, the authors of the winning entries are as much news to us as they are to you because we keep authorship separate from rest of the entry. Some people have it, we guess!

There were a few very good entries that might have won if it were not for the fact that they didn’t work. If you didn’t win, but think you had a chance: test your program, fix it and submit it next year!

This year we awarded some outstanding entries. We recommend that you look at all of the winning entries. The list of winning entries is a bit too long to say something about every entry. On the other hand a partial mention of a few is in order:

Audiences were very impressed with the Best of Show entry.
The judges were amused that for the first time we received an entry that caused gcc to give the assembler bad input in some cases.
The poot entries (dlowe, dloweneil got a good laugh from the USENIX IOCCC BOF (Birds Of a Feather) crowd.
Those with Functional Programming knowledge as well as those impressed with CPP code expansion like the entry that translates lambda expressions into combinator expressions.
Logic minded folks will get somewhat twisted up while following the flow of the Best Flow Control entry.
Those who know the PostScript language will be ‘bemused’ by the Best Encapsulation entry.

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.

There was no 1997 contest

So what happened to 1997? There was no summer USENIX Technical Conference. The Technical Conference was held Jun 15-19, 1998 instead … 18 months later than the 1996 summer USENIX Technical Conference. In addition we had to select some new IOCCC judges. As a result the IOCCC skipped over 1997.

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 additional information on the IOCCC.

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.

You must include the words ‘ioccc question’ in the subject of your email message when sending email to the judges.

The next IOCCC is planned to start towards the end of 1999. Watch www.ioccc.org for news of the next contest.