Rules
Each year, the rules of the contest are published on the IOCCC website. Rules vary from year to year and are posted with a set of guidelines that attempt to convey the spirit of the rules.
The rules are often deliberately written with subtle loopholes that contestants are somewhat encouraged to find and abuse. This is the result of the contest being a "parody of the software development process". Entries that take advantage of some loophole in the rules (whether or not they pass a final round of judging) can cause the rules for the following year's contest to be adjusted accordingly (although often other subtle loopholes are deliberately introduced in the process).
Read more about this topic: International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Famous quotes containing the word rules:
“... a large portion of success is derived from flexibility. It is all very well to have principles, rules of behavior concerning right and wrong. But it is quite as essential to know when to forget as when to use them.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“As no one can tell what was the Roman pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us of the vowels only A has a peculiar sound.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)