Fifteenth 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.

New Judge

The judges were unable to contact Jeremy Horn for judging the 2000 contest.

As a result, Simon Cooper joined our team. Simon is well known for being a co-author of the 2nd edition of the Building Internet Firewalls book.

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 compact obfuscation. But don’t ignore the shorter entries. The Best small program, Best abuse of user and Most complete program are well worth studying in detail.

The Worst abuse of the rules is technically allowed by the rules. We gave it an award this year, but don’t assume you can get away with using it next time … :-)

Speaking of time, be sure to check out the Astronomically obfuscated and the Most timely output entries.

There was no 1999 contest

So what happened to 1999? Landon Curt Noll was scheduled to take a vacation from the IOCCC this year. The remaining judges were unable to contact Jeremy Horn, so the IOCCC stalled.

But thanks to Landon’s returning early from his IOCCC vacation (Landon will take a full IOCCC vacation during some other year), Simon Cooper joining the IOCCC judging team as well as the hard work of Peter Seebach and Leonid A. Broukhis the judging was completed in Dec 2000.

It was decided that the 15th contest would be the year 2000 contest (the year the judging completed) rather than year 1999 (the initial scheduled start of the contest). That is why there is no 1999 contest.

NOTE: The above has been mentioned in an Amici Curiae for the DeCSS case. See BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE N SUPPORT OF APPELLANTS AND REVERSAL.

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.