2005 marked the "The Eighteenth International Obfuscated C Code Contest" ======================================================================== Copyright (C) 2005, Landon Curt Noll, Simon Cooper, and Leonid A. Broukhis. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission from the contest judges. Standard IOCCC stuff -------------------- The IOCCC has a web site and now has a number of international mirrors. The primary site can be found at, > Use make to compile entries. It is possible that on non-Un*x / non-Linux systems the makefile needs to be changed. See the Makefile for details. Look at the source and try to figure out what the programs do, and run them with various inputs. If you want to, look at the hints files for spoilers - this year we included most of the information included by the submitters. Read over the makefile for compile/build issues. Your system may require certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a #define). 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. 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 winners. In particular: + The Abuse of the rules used local dictionary data to get around the size limit. + The Most beauteous visuals made cleaver use of {}'s and whitespace in their source code and during execution. + The most circuitous walk entry is just amazing. + The Best game makes full use of its single function. + The Best emulator may allow you to re-connect to your first PET. + Our Best of Show this year was simply (or non-simply) the best! + (And we need only mention (parenthetically speaking) that the the best use of parenthesis is self re-producing). + The most sonorous output might sound like a good idea. + The Best 2D puzzle takes editorial license with expressions as well as the with the vi editor. + The Most ambiguous language winner is really a C program. + The superfluous output winner is simply Voronoilific! + Try not to have your sense of good coding offended by the Most discourteous interpreter winner. + The Best use of the www doesn't include those letters + You will be puzzled by Best 3D puzzle winner, we are sure! + The Most ingenious puzzle solution might puzzle you more while it puzzles out some puzzles: all in a puzzling way! :-) Final Comments -------------- Please feel free to send us comments and suggestions about the competition, this README or anything else that you would like to see in future contests. 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. If you have problems with any of the entries, AND YOU HAVE A FIX, please send us the fix (patch file or the entire changed file). For the latest information on how to contact the IOCCC Judges please visit > For news of the next contest watch: >