As you probably know, there used to be an "International Obfuscated C Code Contest", where the goal was to explore the subtleties of the C language by seeing who could write the most obfuscated code.
That contest, however, ended in 2006, and I believe the organizers completely lost interest in it, since the winning code of the 2006 edition has yet to be released! You can read more about it on its Wikipedia entry -> International Obfuscated C Code Contest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I think that such a contest is a great idea for several reasons. It's fun, it helps intermediate/advanced C programmers to explore the language even further, it helps beginner C programmers to learn complex aspects of the C language and so on.
That is why I want to give a shot at reviving that contest (with a different name and different rules). The main idea is to make the contest a lot simpler than what it used to be.
Basically I think that competitors should write a simple and small C program that prints out something, and the goal is to make it so obscure that other C programmers won't be able to understand what is going to be printed just by looking at the code.
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Here's a draft of the rules:
1. The contest would be held online, so all the information, submissions and entries would be available on the contest's website.
2. Submissions would need to be a single C file, with a single int main() function that prints out something (for the sake of simplicity, as explained above).
3. The file should have 200 or fewer characters (for the sake of forcing people to be concise and to focus on specific aspects of the language).
4. Only stdio.h and stdlib.h would be allowed (for the sake of focusing on the core aspects of C).
5. The code would need to be formatted correctly, with one statement per line (i.e., making ASCII art with the code to make it difficult to read is not allowed).
6. All the submissions would be given to a group of 20 judges (experienced C programmers), and the winners would be based on how many of the judges failed to correctly guess what the program prints (without running it, obviously).
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What do you guys think about the general idea, and about the draft set of rules?
Any feedback is appreciated, and if you want to volunteer to be a judge please let me know as well.