Twenty Second International Obfuscated C Code Contest

Standard IOCCC stuff

View the index.html web page for the given winning entry for information on how compile the entry 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 again be impressed with this year’s winning entries.

This year, 9 won 15 awards. For the first time in the history of the contest, one person, Yusuke Endoh won 4 times while Adrian Cable won 3 times! It is also worth noting that Chris Mills’ last win was in 1993. Welcome back Chris!

We, the judges, were very surprised by this as many of the multiple authors submitted very different styles of entries.

This year was the first time the IOCCC size tool was used. Entries had to print a value 2053 or less when the -i flag was used.

Several people discovered an undocumented feature in that certain comments such as:

        ///*

or:

        *\
        /

were not correctly parsed by the tool. The guidelines stated:

In cases where the above summary and the algorithm implemented by the IOCCC size tool source code conflict, the algorithm implemented by the IOCCC size tool source code is preferred by the judges.

… so this abuse was allowed (and encouraged). The judges hope that the IOCCC size tool author will patch the tool to block this kind of size abuse in future contests.

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

were way way oversized and didn’t even attempt to justify their excess by a clever abuse of the rules
depended on a single obfuscation trick
could only be run on a particular vendor’s platform
were very similar to previous winning entry
didn’t work as documented

We hope that the authors of some of those entries will fix and resubmit 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 entry must not only compete against other submissions from the current year but they must also excel over similar previous 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.