International Obfuscated C Code Contest Winners Posted

January 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

ioccc

The International Obfuscated C Contest – the contest to create the most useful, useless, or unique program in absolutely unreadable C code – has just posted the winners of the 2013 contest.

Of the entries of note, a few really stand out. The pic at the top of this post, for instance, comes courtesy of this submission. It’s an iterative ray tracer stuck inside an infinite loop that, when left running overnight, is able to produce amazing renders.

An IOCCC contest wouldn’t be complete without some ASCII art C code, and this entry fits the bill. It’s a Tetris painting tool that creates images made out of tetronomoes. Each image is built up one line at a time from the bottom up, using Tetris’ lack of physics to create a picture out of un-cleared lines.

One of the most impressive entries for this (last?) year’s contest is a tiny 8086 PC emulator/virtual machine written in only 4043 bytes of code. It’s a fully functional 80s-era PC emulator that can run vintage copies of AutoCAD, Windows, Lotus 1-2-3, and SimCity.

All the submissions are awesome, but like any IOCCC contest, there aren’t actually any winners. Or they’re all winners. The Obfuscated rules aren’t very clear in that regard.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest Is Back

November 14, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is back. The stated goals of the IOCCC are to, “Write the most obscure C program, show the importance of programming style (by doing the opposite), stress the preprocessor to the breaking point, and illustrate some subtleties of the C language.” If you think you’re up to the task of abusing your compiler, check out the rules and guidelines for the contest.

There’s nothing quite like having the code for a flight simulator look like a plane, or calculating pi by measuring the area of C code. The submissions to the IOCCC are classic hacks; very clever things that shouldn’t work, but do despite themselves.

There hasn’t been an IOCCC competition since 2006, and no one knows if it will be around next year. We’ve already seen a few potential entries for this year, like piping chars into /dev/audio to generate a song and hyperlinks all the way down. If you’ve got something you’re working on, feel free to send it in.

via /.

Annoy Your Sound Guy Even More

November 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

“I can’t hear myself in the mix,” “yeah, man, I’ll be there at 8,” and “dude, we need like four more mics.” Each and every one of these words is documented in actuarial tables and doesn’t bode well for your sound tech’s risk of a stroke. Luckily, there’s an even better way to kill your sound guy and this time, it’s actually pretty clever.

[@dop3j0e] at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace came up with the Noiseplug. It’s a very small build that could almost fit into a quarter-inch jack. It’s all SMD with a tiny ~~(unknown)~~ ATtiny9 microcontroller powered by a watch battery.

The music coming out of the Noiseplug is really interesting. All the code on the microcontroller is a one-liner written in C. Similar ‘algorithmic chiptune’ programs can be run on any PC: check out these three examples.

These potential entries to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest throw chars into an 8-bit PCM stream. Piping the output of these programs to /dev/audio would generate an actual song – written entirely in one line of C.

Of course, [@dop3j0e] could have made his Noiseplug a little less annoying, but sound techs are underappreciated for a reason, right?

Check out the Noiseplug in action after the break along with a few one-liner C songs.

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