Twenty Fifth 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. This year we included most of the information included by the submitter.

Some C compilers are not quite as good as they should be. If yours is lacking, you may need to compile using clang or gcc instead of your local compiler.

The primary website can be found at www.ioccc.org.

Remarks on some of the winning entries

We believe you will again be impressed with this year’s winning entries.

The Best of Show - 2018/mills is an amazing tribute to entries from 1984 and 2015.

Take a close look at the Most likely to top the charts - 2018/hou. Observe that while it contains no variables and no operators, it remains functional in what it does.

The Best one-liner - 2018/burton1, at 109 characters, is a short and sweet implementation of a classic utility and a nod to a winning entry from 1986. Sometimes it takes 20 some years to do things the true IOCCC way.

The Best use of python - 2018/endoh2 is not what you might think it is. It is something completely different.

The Most likely to be awarded - 2018/ciura has an amazing vocabulary!

There are also nods to entries of the years 2000/bellard, 2015/yang, …

…We’ll stop spouting too many details now. Have fun exploring all the entries!

Historical note:

In 2023-2024 the IOCCC website was drastically changed with the same look for every year and this changed the styling as well. But in 2018 different years had different stylesheets and we noted that:

The color of the remarks text this year was inspired by one of the stars of the Most stellar - 2018/poikola.

Remarks on some of submissions that did not win

The number of entries that would have made it into the final rounds would have been much higher had some people paid attention to rules 2 and 22 (one third of 666).

Rule 22, now known as “Catch 22” states:

Your source code, data files, remarks and program output must NOT identify the authors of your code. The judges STRONGLY prefer to not know who is submitting entries to the IOCCC.

The “Peter Honeyman is exempt” guideline also applies to this rule. Identifying yourself, in an obvious way in your code, data, remarks or program output, unless you are Peter Honeyman or pretending to be Peter Honeyman, will be grounds for disqualification of your entry.

A number of other entries were based on iocccsize.c, making derivative works rather than original works.

Still other entries were too large, violating the first line of rule 2:

The size of your program source must be <= 4096 bytes in length.

While these entries might have passed under the 2053 limit for iocccsize, they were larger than <= 4096 bytes, sometimes by an order or magnitude.

We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit them for the next IOCCC.

Some entries seemed to have a good idea, but the implementation of the idea was limited in scope.

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.