fidzu : nerd

Yesterday 2026's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded, with 22 new winners announced in a special three-hour livestreamed ceremony! Started 42 years ago, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest, with entrants concocting convoluted programs glorying in the C programming language's subtleties, all while having some fun. And "For IOCCC29, the volume and quality of submissions were at near-historic heights," explains its home page. There's a "Tetris-optimized" GameBoy emulator with source code that looks like a GameBoy, as well as a quasi-Rogue-like game voted "most likely to teleport." Awards were also given for the best imaginary emulator (a virtual machine in 366 bytes of C) and the best fractional emulator (a maze generator for the Commodore 64). But every one of the 22 winning programs seems wildly creative... Quine Pong. "Running the program produces the source code to generate the next frame, formatted to display the current frame. By repeatedly compiling and running each successive frame, you can play the game. To move, pass either "w" (up) or "e" (down) as an argument..." A winning Taiwanese programmer formatted their source code in the shape of a Tardis from Doctor Who - code that displays an intricate ASCII animation of Doctor Who's 1963 opening title sequence. One winning entry emulates an IBM 7040 mainframe, first converting a program (encoded in whitespace) into ASCII-character drawings of punchcards for a FORTRAN program - and then executing that program to calculate the light visible to an observer looking at black hole, ultimately creating an image. It's all recreating what astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet had to do in 1978 to generate the first-ever simulated photograph of a black hole (on an IBM 7040 mainframe). "The entry can also run other FORTRAN programs - but "they must be provided as a deck of punch cards... Tools have been provided to convert to/from decks and to interpret..." "We have added fun challenges to this year's winning entries competition..." the web site notes. "After you figure out what a given winning entry does, we encourage you to attempt the fun challenge!" Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader achowe for bringing the news (who has submitted winning entries in four different decades, starting in 1991 and continuing through 2025) - and who won again this year for a program simulating the Space Invaders-like game from Casio's 1980 MG-880 calculator. Follow the IOCCC on Mastodon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jun 2026 5:34pm GMT

Comments

07 Jun 2026 5:18pm GMT

Comments

07 Jun 2026 5:01pm GMT

The new James Bond-themed videogame 007 First Light had a budget of 1.3 billion Danish krone - a little more than USD $202 million, reports IGN, citing a report from Denmark's public service broadcaster. "Denmark's TV 2 said that makes 007 First Light the most expensive entertainment product in the country's history" - and the game "still has some way to go before breaking even." 007 First Light is estimated to have sold 2.2 million copies, generating $150 million in revenue... The only official sales data we have comes from developer IO Interactive, which said that 007 First Light had become the fastest-selling game in the company's history, shifting 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours... The impressive sales milestone was achieved without the aid of the Nintendo Switch 2 version, which is due out this summer. The James Bond adventure is also the highest rated IOI game ever, with an 87 on Metacritic... The developer has said it wants to make a trilogy of James Bond games. Game-tracking company Alinea Analytics tweeted their estimates that 55.1% of sales were on PS5, 33.1% on Steam, and 11.8% on Xbox (Xbox console, Windows, and cloud combined). And Polygon reports that new downloadable game content was announced Friday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jun 2026 4:34pm GMT

COSMIC Desktop's Frosted Glass effect moves closer to release with new Settings controls for opacity, thickness, panels, applets, and windows.

07 Jun 2026 4:20pm GMT

Comments

07 Jun 2026 4:16pm GMT

Science magazine reports: For decades, string theory promised a "theory of everything" that described all particles and forces as tiny vibrating strings. Physicists hoped it could also solve one of the field's deepest problems: reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity. But as string theory grew increasingly elaborate - and experimentally unreachable - many physicists lost hope. Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, Clifford Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues lay out a small set of assumptions about the universe and show that they inevitably give rise to string theory.... Cheung's study, along with another one posted to arXiv in January, starts with two reasonably conservative assumptions: that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of an event add up to 100%, and that the laws of physics are consistent for observers moving at different speeds. Each group then posits additional assumptions that have not been borne out by observations. Cheung's analysis invokes "ultrasoftness," the idea that the probability of certain particle interactions drops off at a particular rate at high energies. The second study, led by University of Michigan physicist Henriette Elvang, instead assumes "supersymmetry," a maximal coupling between matter and forces. Both groups conclude the only theory that can satisfy their assumptions is one that looks like string theory... Cheung and Elvang stress that their aim is not to prove the inevitability of string theory. "I don't have a dog in the fight; I just work here," Cheung says. Rather, the goal is to explore the space of possible theories under rigid constraints - regardless of whether they reflect reality... The one thing the researchers all agree on is that the field would benefit from more alternative models to string theory. Cheung sees the agnostic, bottom-up exploration as a step in that direction. "You can either give up on the problem because it's too culturally toxic, or you can ask: If you want to find an alternative, what do you need?" he says. "Now, we know exactly what to do." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Jun 2026 3:34pm GMT

Hyprland 0.55.3 backports fixes from main to the 0.55 branch, covering config reloads, rendering, monitors, XWayland, and more.

07 Jun 2026 1:53pm GMT

How accurate does an AI system need to be?

07 Jun 2026 11:08am GMT

Armbian Imager 2.0 now allows users to preconfigure a username, password, Wi-Fi, timezone, locale, SSH keys, and shell before flashing.

07 Jun 2026 9:50am GMT

Those ousted included ADA journal editor-in-chief Steven Kahn and former ADA president Desmond Schatz

06 Jun 2026 8:53pm GMT

What's the difference between a person, an artifact, and an ecosystem?

06 Jun 2026 11:15am GMT