The ‘Obfuscated C Code Contest’ Confronts the Age of AI

This year’s International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) returned after a four-year hiatus, saw a record 23 winning entries due to the unusually high number of high-quality submissions.

The winning entries showcased the masters of the C language, with one program containing invisible Unicode characters to print a salmon recipe, and another that rickrolled the judges with an 8-bit music and graphic port from the Atari 2600.

Judges, including founder Landon Curt Noll, noted that while they experimented with Large Language Models (LLMs) to…