Best Obfuscated Algorithm: E. Jay Berkenbilt Engineering Research Associates 1595 Springhill Road Vienna, VA 22182-2235 USA Judges' comments: To run: make ejb ./ejb level where: level a value from -128 to 127 A negative argument plays the patience puzzle. An argument greater than 0 plays the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. In either case the absolute value of the argument specifies the size of the respective puzzle. Refer to the files ejb.explain1 and ejb.explain2 for more information on these puzzles. Of course, you need a different kind of "patience" if you give the argument 127 to this program and want to see it finish! Selected notes from the author: WHAT THIS PROGRAM DOES ====================== ./ejb 5 Output: solution to Towers of Hanoi for five rings ./ejb -6 Output: solution to the Patience puzzle for six rings The format of the output for the Towers of Hanoi case is simply a text description of how to solve the puzzle. For the patience puzzle, the output is a sequence binary codes representing successive states of the puzzle. The rightmost digit represents the first ring. A "1" means the ring is on the U; a "0" means it is off the U. The program prints the word "Invalid" in response to illegal command line parameters. MOTIVATION ========== Most people who have written software for other people have been asked to count lines of code. Naturally, this brings up the controversial question of exactly what defines a line of code. This program serves to show that counting semicolons will not always provide a meaningful measure of code size. This is especially true in this program where the number of semicolons itself is ambiguous. Does it have two or three? In addition, the only "C" keyword this program uses besides type names and qualifiers is "return", and the only function defined in the code is "main". The level of complexity of the program without multiple semicolons, statements, and functions is achieved by abusing C operators, especially the comma operator. Considerable use of ||, &&, and ? : helps too. In addition, main is called recursively. The null pointer that terminates argv is used to pass additional information into main. Even though the algorithms used by this code are simple, this program is still hard to follow even when indented properly. (It is pretty hard to indent this code reasonably, however.) Although this program is has only been tested on UNIX systems but will probably run on just about any machine with an ANSI C compiler. It does not use the C preprocessor at all. The only functions it uses are atoi, malloc, memset, printf, and puts. It does, however, require that the architecture it runs on have bytes that are at least eight bits long and pointers that are at least four bytes long. In addition, it requires an ANSI compiler since it uses "signed char" and ANSI-style function declarations. Copyright (c) 1993, 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.