alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure this kind of competition is still meaningful, given that LLM can easily convert a program clearly written in any programming language to the most obfuscated C code, and can still easily verify it's correctness in an automated way.
Do I miss anything?
Replies
Yes, you haven’t tried it. LLMs are actually awesome at deobfuscation, but terrible at obfuscation. They just can’t do it yet.
They also lack the creativity needed for those entries. Obfuscation is only one part of it. Coming up with the idea is another. Many entries also have special qualities that make them true works of art.
yes llm can do it but i think competitions have more to do with developing scientific temperament, competitive mindset and complex problem solving skills. that's why i think they are still relevant and will be relevant for a long time.
You are missing that the IOCCC isn’t just about obfuscation, that the judges have taste.
> Do I miss anything?
That human art is worth the humanity in the art.
As soon as anything is automated, it's worth nothing.
Where's the fun in that?
> Do I miss anything?
School ? /s
The competition never was about actual obfuscation. If you really just want obfuscation, you are actually writing a DRM system, like Denuvo.
If anything, it is closer to code golf, the main obfuscation is often a result of all the trickery needed to do something impressive in a small amount of code. Of course, minification techniques are used, like renaming variables to single character and messing with the formatting, but that's the boring part, no one is going to win because of that.
Another aspect is being clever and unique, and abusing the rules is often rewarded... once. LLMs are not good at that. The judges are human, the code needs to a appeal to a human, not just be hard to understand.