{"id":732093,"date":"2026-06-12T15:26:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/732093\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T15:26:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:26:20","slug":"the-worlds-weirdest-coding-contest-honors-the-most-unreadable-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/732093\/","title":{"rendered":"The World\u2019s Weirdest Coding Contest Honors the Most Unreadable Programs"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an age of vibecoding and AI assistants, there\u2019s something admirable about the desire to work within a set of limitations when coding. Last week, we covered an assembly program<\/a> that managed to generate both visuals and music within only 16 bytes of code, and this week we\u2019ve got something even more arcane: the results of the 29th International Obfuscated C Contest,<\/a> which may well be the world\u2019s strangest and most esoteric programming competition.<\/p>\n

The basic idea is simple: write a program in C that compiles and runs properly, but whose purpose and means of operation are as difficult as possible to figure out by looking at the program\u2019s source code. And boy, do people write some crazy-looking code. Here\u2019s an example from this year\u2019s competition:<\/p>\n

\"IOCCC\u00a9 IOCCC <\/p>\n

The above is one of this year\u2019s winners<\/a>, and if you can take a look at it and figure out what it does, you get all the gold stars. So what does it do? Glad you asked! It creates a pretty nifty simulation of a Lichtenberg figure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"IOCCC\u00a9 Gizmodo <\/p>\n

A few months back, security researcher and YouTuber LaurieWired posted a video<\/a> about last year\u2019s competition in which she used a decompiler to pull apart the binaries of various entries and then tried to predict what they actually did. Her success rate was about 50%, and that\u2019s working from the decompiled programs, not the actual code. If she\u2019s only batting .500, you can bet that the rest of us are going to be hovering around .000.<\/p>\n

The inaugural contest was held way back in 1984, and the competition has been running on and off ever since. This most recent set of winners was announced on a livestream on YouTube that gives a pretty good sense of the sort of insanity with which we\u2019re dealing here:<\/p>\n

While writing obfuscated code is the competition\u2019s raison d\u2019etre, entrants also have a penchant for writing code that combines being incomprehensible with looking cool. Here\u2019s an example<\/a>, which creates five minutes of soothing white noise, accompanied by the sort of generative music of which Brian Eno would be proud:<\/p>\n

\"Ioccc\u00a9 IOCCC <\/p>\n

And another, which simulates digging a hole straight down through the earth to see whereabouts on the other side of the globe you\u2019d end up:<\/p>\n

\"IOCCC\u00a9 IOCCC <\/p>\n

These programs make use of the fact that C doesn\u2019t register whitespace characters\u2014spaces, tabs, and newlines\u2014when parsing code. That means you can indent and move your code around however you like\u2014allowing you, for example, to place the word \u201cRELAX\u201d in the middle of your program\u2019s source code. Some also make use of comments to artistic effect.<\/p>\n

Others get\u00a0way\u00a0crazier. This one, for example, renders its own source code as a game of Pong. Wait, what? Well, here\u2019s the source code (note: that last line goes on for wayyyy longer than would fit on my screen for a screenshot):<\/p>\n

\"IOCCC\u00a9 IOCCC <\/p>\n

\u2026and here\u2019s the output. This is a single screencap, but the two longer spaces on each side move up and down with user input, while the smaller one bounces back and forth:<\/p>\n

\"IOCCC\u00a9 Gizmodo <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re wondering how one codes something like this, there\u2019s a long explanation on the entry\u2019s page<\/a> at the IOCCC website. The site also hosts all this year\u2019s winning entries<\/a>, which you can download and compile yourself. Have fun, and if you can actually figure out how any of these work\u2026 consider a career in computer science?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an age of vibecoding and AI assistants, there\u2019s something admirable about the desire to work within a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,63,354265,105],"class_list":["post-732093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-ioccc","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}