Twenty First 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.

Historical note:

The IOCCC has a website and now has a number of international mirrors. The primary website can be found at www.ioccc.org.

Historical update:

The IOCCC website once had a number of international mirrors. As of 2020 Dec 29, GitHub serves as the distributed server farm for the IOCCC winner repo that GitHub renders as Official IOCCC web site - www.ioccc.org.

Remarks on some of the entries

We believe you will be impressed with this year’s winning entries. We had a very difficult time picking a single best from among the other entries because the overall quality of the submissions were so high.

This year we selected the top 4 entries for particularly high honors:

Balanced use of obfuscation - Gold Award

A very extremely subtle and twisted piece of source code! Even if you start with the zeitak.alt.c source, you will still have a very challenging time to understand it!
Most elementary use of C - Silver Award

A fun program that could also have won “Best abuse of Ghostscript” because it managed to create some PDF files that Ghostscript could not read.
Best use of cocoa - Bronze Award

A picture within a picture is worth more than a thousand (4 byte) words. :-)
Most complex ASCII fluid - Honorable mention

When you see this program in action, you too will very likely say wow as we did!

But don’t ignore the other winning entries! There are games, utilities, eye candy, calculators and graphical tools to explore.

This year, Yusuke Endoh won with two entries, one of which (endoh1) won the special Honorable mention award. Eight of the winning entries were from people who won in previous years.

This year we had a number of authors from Asia. We saw our second entry from China and our first from Korea. We are pleased to see outstanding entries from areas of the world that have not been active in past contests. Will we see an upswing of entries from South America, Africa and Antarctica next year? :-)

Please note that judging is done completely anonymously. Please do NOT reveal your identity in your source code. In the future we may disqualify entries that reveal the identity of the submitter!

There were some outstanding entries that did not win. Unfortunately some very good entries lost because they:

would take years to execute
were way way oversize and didn’t even attempt to justify their excess by a clever abuse of the rules
obfuscate themselves by simply invoking a complex state machine
depend on a single obfuscation trick
could only be run on a particular vendor’s platform
were very similar to previous winning entries
were based on an overused theme such as yet another fractal display program
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 entries set a very high bar. A new winning entry must not only compete against other submissions form the current year, they must also excel over similar winning entry in some particularly impressive way.

Final Comments

IMPORTANT NOTE: 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.