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317070
I have tried navigate the page, but I still have not figured out what the goal was this year, who won, with which program and what has been obfuscated in it. Is there a better summary of this contest somewhere? Is there a link I'm missing?
syberspace
right at the top are a couple of links like rules.txt and whowon.html, those might explain a bit more
raldu
Goals: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/rules.txt

Who Won?: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/whowon.html

Guidelines: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/guidelines.txt

jjoonathan
rules.txt contains rules and the overarching goals of the IOCCC, not the particular theme/goal for this year, and now I've wasted a few minutes poking through it to make sure. Thanks a lot.
simias
I don't think there are any "goals" to the IOCC beyond writing the most clever and obfuscated code. There are only rules limiting what's acceptable.
meta_AU
Are you perhaps thinking of the underhanded code contest?
317070
I am! Good catch, that explains my confusion. :-)
Cthulhu_
The page / site really needs a redesign and a bit of writing done.

I'm actually of a mind to start a new webpage that does just that, but there might be some copyright issues there.

DoreenMichele
I'm not sure what copyright issues (writing or code or?) you are concerned about, but you should be able to get around them with a little planning. Just don't outright copy stuff.
jjuhl
Or just get in touch with the people behind the site and ask for explicit permission. Seems the simplest way to be sure, no?
DoreenMichele
"It is easier to get forgiveness than permission." -- Words of wisdom from a career bureaucrat.

I think the simplest way is to just set up a site and make sure you cite your sources. The site under discussion here would be a primary source and should be listed as such on every single page that references any of the data found there.

Beyond that, it really depends on what the GP intends.

Start a blog and write a little blurb about each winner as separate blog posts? I don't think any permission is needed. Just write whatever you want to say about the project and note that they are the winner listed here and link to the page where they are listed.

Start a clone of the site that adds additional info? Yeah, you maybe need to go talk to folks and find out if they are okay with that and get it in writing.

vanderZwan
> Creative Commons License. This work by Landon Curt Noll, Simon Cooper, and Leonid A. Broukhis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Should be fine, no?

szc
An IOCCC Judge here. Do you want to volunteer? What do you have in mind? Please contact us at j.2018@ioccc.org and include "IOCCC 2018" in the subject line. Thanks!
vanderZwan
Not GP, but if you put the whole website on a git repo people can contribute easily (I can somehow imagine you may not too keen on handing things over to Github or something centralised like that, but surely you can have a self-hosting option)
cornstalks
Fabrice Bellard (the wizard behind FFmpeg, QEMU, etc.) has his own entry, which I find amazing: a ~4 kB program that outputs a ~50 kB image (of Lena), in addition to being able to decompress other images. His entry's hint page: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/bellard/hint.html
cdancette
Can you explain a bit more how this works? I am not familiar at all with these challenges

50kB to 4kB is a 10x compression, it doesn't seem that huge, what's the achievement here?

saagarjha
Achieving 10x compression in a 4kB program+data file hybrid is pretty hard to do.
w23j
From the author's comments:

"The uncompressed image is 12 times larger than the source code of the program which includes the image data and the complete decoder. The actual image data is 1220 byte long, which gives a compression ratio of 40. Using a JPEG-like algorithm would not be enough to reach this level of compression (the Lena image would be barely recognizable). So the algorithm is based on the latest advances in image compression."

http://www.ioccc.org/2018/bellard/hint.html

rntrg
From the author’s notes:

> The actual image data is 1220 byte long, which gives a compression ratio of 40.

boomlinde
Those 4k include the decoder source code and the C string representation of the image data
Asooka
It's a 3KB decoder and 1KB of image data, from the hint: "The actual image data is 1220 byte long, which gives a compression ratio of 40"
saagarjha
For those using iTerm, a nice way to try this out is running it through imgcat:

  make && ./prog < lena512.bin | imgcat
ufo
If you have ImageMagick installed the `display` utility can also show PPM images from stdin:

    ./prog < lena512.bin | display
---

btw, the `animate` program can also be used to display the animated GIFs from endoh1.

ufo
Is there a program available somewhere to generate our own compressed image (.bin) files?
wonthegame
GIMP?
ufo
Didn't he come up with a custom image compression scheme? Or am I understanding this wrong?
wonthegame
It might be custom. I haven't checked or compared. There are options to save images in other formats with GIMP.
vardump
You understood correctly. This is a custom format that has some ideas from h.264 and who knows what else.
vardump
Almost certainly not yet. The compression method seems to be pretty advanced, borrowing ideas from h.264 etc. and is almost certainly incompatible with any currently existing format.

If we're lucky, Bellard might eventually post an image compressor program on his website at https://bellard.org/.

vardump
Here's the default output (embedded 1220 byte 128x128 Lena picture) of Fabrice's IOCCC entry converted into PNG:

https://pasteboard.co/Hk60KEv.png

Of course there are plenty of compression artifacts, but very impressive for just 1220 bytes of image data embedded in decompressor written in C totaling only 3984 bytes of source code!

No idea about what kind of service pasteboard.co is, hopefully the image will stay up for a while...

Edit: For comparison, here's a roughly corresponding original Lena image converted into 1269 byte 128x128 JPEG.

  convert -resize 128x128 -strip -quality 12% lena.png lena.jpg
https://pasteboard.co/Hk67yXC.png
[dead] ajackfox
This contest is basically the equivalent of software development masturbation, but the things people create are incredible none the less!

The 'sound based cat' is one of my favorites: http://www.ioccc.org/2018/algmyr/hint.html (I do NOT recommend running this with anything but minimal volume!)

Froyoh
You know this competition is old when they still use .text files
rollcat
Stuff that works doesn't need fixing.

It's very liberating, when you don't need to chase a trend.

londons_explore
The trend of three letter file extensions has been around since about 1989?
algmyr
I'm more used to .md or .markdown, but apparently .text is also used for markdown files. Picking .txt (which I assume you're hinting at) would not be the most specific choice here.
JdeBP
poikola:

    X enum  {T,F}  z; //True & False

    #define E {
    #define B }
Old ideas, but they'll still catch people out.

It's interesting to see how well, or badly, the syntax colourization in NeoVIM copes with the various entries.

tudorconstantin
And they say Perl is unreadable
alien_at_work
Funny enough, the creator of Perl's previously well known accomplishment was winning these contests pretty much any time he cared to join. Take that as you will.
ufo
Yusuke Endoh's "Best Use of Python" entry is a memetic masterpiece
ufo
Christopher Mill's "Best of Show" pdp-7 emulator is seriously impressive. How is this even possible in such a small program?
szc
An IOCCC Judge here. We are rather fond of this one. The "prog" variant allows you to build and run the mullender entry from the first IOCCC http://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1984. The source is provided in the image, as is the compiler.
ufo
Don Yang provided a video of how he wrote the code and transformed it into the obfuscated version (see spoiler.html). It is as interesting as the final result itself.
phab 

  > # There is no 2016 IOCCC contest
  > # There is no 2017 IOCCC contest
Anybody know why?
szc
An IOCCC Judge here. Sure, a variety of things! A competition can take about 4 full weekends of time ~128hrs total (Fri:6+Sat:16+Sun:10 x 4) to set up, judge and release the results. Getting 3 independent and very busy people coordinated with work, travel and major life events going on can get quite difficult. Recently we've opted to not start a competition if we do not pre-schedule the weekends for completing it! The result is that 2016 and 2017 could not happen.
phab
Thanks! And thanks for taking the time to organise these competitions when you can, they're truly edifying.
Adamantcheese
Yang's spoiler.html is actually super interesting as it's a live coding session for the entire program essentially. Also I thought the program name looked familiar when it said nuko, it's from the manga/anime Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou. It's a cute little thing that likes to eat technology, looks like this one's eaten four programs!
dx7tnt
Anyone else feel that their URL should be cocic.gro ?