I get a kick out of reading the top entries in the Obfuscated C contest every year–in the same way that it’s kind of amusing to see the guy who built a 3 story house of of crushed pop cans. You kind of goggle that someone would spend that much effort on something so fundamentally useless, but you can’t help but find it amused.
Well, a new contest announced this year is something that I might actually have to enter, if only to see how my Evil Genius cred stacks up against the rest of the field:
2005 Underhanded C Contest
Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.
