The worldwide Obfuscated C contest – the contest to produce the most useful, useless, or distinct program in absolutely unreadable C code – has just published the winners of the 2013 contest.
Of the entrances of note, a few truly stand out. The picture at the top of this post, for instance, comes courtesy of this submission. It’s an iterative ray tracer stuck inside an unlimited loop that, when left running overnight, is able to create fantastic renders.
An IOCCC contest wouldn’t be total without some ASCII art C code, as well as this entry fits the bill. It’s a Tetris painting tool that produces pictures constructed out of tetronomoes. Each picture is developed up one line each time from the bottom up, utilizing Tetris’ lack of physics to produce a photo out of un-cleared lines.
One of the most outstanding entrances for this (last?) year’s contest is a small 8086 PC emulator/virtual device written in only 4043 bytes of code. It’s a completely practical 80s-era PC emulator that can run vintage copies of AutoCAD, Windows, Lotus 1-2-3, as well as SimCity.
All the submissions are awesome, however like any type of IOCCC contest, there aren’t really any type of winners. Or they’re all winners. The Obfuscated guidelines aren’t extremely remove in that regard.