2000 marked the "The Fifteenth International Obfuscated C Code Contest"

Copyright (C) Landon Curt Noll, Simon Cooper, Peter Seebach
and Leonid A. Broukhis, 2000.
All Rights Reserved.  Permission for personal, educational or non-profit
use is granted provided this copyright and notice are included in its
entirety and remains unaltered.  All other uses must receive prior permission
from the contest judges.


Standard IOCCC stuff
--------------------

Use make to compile entries.  It is possible that on non-Un*x / non-Linux
systems the makefile needs to be changed.  See the Makefile for details.

Look at the source and try to figure out what the programs do, and run
them with various inputs.  If you want to, look at the hints files for
spoilers - this year we included most of the information included
by the submitters.

Read over the makefile for compile/build issues.  Your system may
require certain changes (add or remove a library, add or remove a
#define).

Some ANSI C compilers are not quite as good as they should be.  If
yours is lacking, you may need to compile using gcc instead of your
local compiler.


New Judge
---------

The judges were unable to contact Jeremy Horn for judging the 2000 contest.

As a result, Simon Cooper:

	http://www.sfik.com/

joined our team.  Simon is well known for being a co-author of the 2nd
edition of the Building Internet Firewalls book.


Remarks on some of the entries
------------------------------

There were some outstanding entries that did not win.  Unfortunately
some very good entries lost because they:

    + depended too much on non-portable side effects in expressions;
    + depended too much on a particular byte order;
    + required the use of a special script, data file or pseudo-machine
      language that was not supplied with the entry.

We hope the authors of some of those entries will fix and re-submit
them for the next IOCCC.

We believe you will be impressed with this year's winners.  The
Best of Show is a fine example of compact obfuscation. But don't
ignore the shorter winners.  The Best Small Program, Best Abuse of
User and Most Complete Program are well worth studying in detail.

The Worst Abuse of the Rules is technically allowed by the rules.
We gave it an award this year, but don't assume you can get away
with using it next time ... :-)

Speaking of time, be sure to check out the Astronomically Obfuscated
and the Most Timely Output.


There was no 1999 contest
-------------------------

So what happened to 1999?  Landon Curt Noll was scheduled to take a
vacation from the IOCCC this year.  The remaining judges were
unable to contact Jeremy Horn, so the IOCCC stalled.

But thanks to Landon's returning early from his IOCCC vacation (Landon
will take a full IOCCC vacation during some other year), Simon Cooper
joining the IOCCC judging team as well as the hard work of Peter Seebach
and Leonid A. Broukhis the judging was completed in Dec 2000.

It was decided that the 15th contest would be the year 2000 contest
(the year the judging completed) rather than year 1999 (the initial
scheduled start of the contest).  That is why there is no 1999 contest.



Final Comments
--------------

Please send us comments and suggestions what we have expressed above.
Also include anything else that you would like to see in future contests.
Send such email to:

	questions@ioccc.org

If you use, distribute or publish these entries in some way, please drop
us a line.  We enjoy seeing who, where and how the contest is used.

You must include the words ``ioccc question'' in the subject of your EMail
message when sending EMail to the judges.

If you have problems with any of the entries, AND YOU HAVE A FIX, please
EMail the fix (patch file or the entire changed file) to the above address.

The next IOCCC is planned to start towards early spring 2001.  Watch:

	http://www.ioccc.org/

for news of the next contest.

=-=

p.s. The has been mentioned in an Amici Curiae for the DeCSS case.  See:

    http://cryptome.org/mpaa-v-2600-bac.htm

and seach on the word ioccc (twice).

