1992 marked the "The Ninth International Obfuscated C Code Contest"

Copyright (c) 1992, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel.
All Rights Reserved.  Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is
granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety
and remains unaltered.  All other uses must receive prior permission in writing
from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.

Use make to compile entries.  It is possible that on BSD or non-unix
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).  A number of compilers had problems optimizing certain
entries.  Some compilers do optimize, but the resulting program
does not work.  By default we have left off -O from compile lines.  
You might want to add -O back, or add it back for certain entries
where performance is important.

This year marked an all time high for number of entries as well as the
quality of entries.  Nearly twice the usual number of entries made it
to the final judging rounds.  Even when we raised the standards for
winning, we still wound giving out a few more awards than in other
years.  The new size rules size probably contributed to the overall
high quality.

FYI: By tradition, we do not record the count the number entries,
     nor do we give our our guess as to the number of entries 
     received.  For folks who wonder, we can say that we consumed 
     about 2000 pages of output (printing between 2 and 4 normal 
     pages per side) during the judging process this year.

The new instructions for submitting entries worked well - we were
able to write scripts to unpack them and eliminate duplicates.

As promised last year, we accepted programs that made use of the X
libraries for the first time.  We now consider ANSI C compilers to be
the "standard" version that the entries were compiled with.

Name and address information are separated from the actual program
prior to judging.  This eliminates any chance that we would bias our
judging for/against any person or group.  In the end, we are surprised
as you are to see who as won.  Even so, it is worth noting that
Brian Westley has submitted a winning entry for the past 6 years!


A few notes regarding future contests:

We did not give awards to some traditional contest categories such as
"Best Layout".  We felt that to do so would deny awards to more
deserving entries.  These categories have not been eliminated.  We will
likely be awarding them in future years.

We received a few entries whose instructions were rot13'd.  While
nothing was said about this in the rules, we found that it made the 
judging process a little harder, so we may request that this not
be done this in the future.

Some thought has been given to a separate obfuscated perl contest.
Watch comp.lang.perl for details!

Be sure to wait until the 1993 rules are posted before submitting entries.  
We may fine tune the rules to reflect the some ideas above.

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:

	...!{sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!judges
	judges@toad.com


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.

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.

Credits:

We would like to thank Barbara Frezza for her role as official chef of
the contest.  Landon Noll and Larry Bassel appreciated the opportunity
to serve as official taste testers. Yummo!
