SlashNOT

Michael writes: The winners of the 2005 International Obfuscated C Code Contest have been announced. J. G. Tillman, an aspiring writer in Naples, Florida, was surprised when he was notified of his winning entry.

“I had been trying desperately to write 50,000 words of my unfinished novel, Death Comes to the Armadillo, by the end of November for NaNoWriMo,” said Tillman, referring to the National Novel Writing Month competition. “At some point, after 28 hours without sleep, I started experimenting with parentheses and other punctuation in an attempt to evoke e. e. cummings. I awoke to find my screen covered with what I thought was complete gibberish, but apparently I wrote a recursively subdividing radix sort algorithm by mistake.”

Tillman had no prior experience with the C language, but after discovering a working Naive Bayesian Classifier in one of his other unfinished novels, he is considering a career in programming.