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by fooker10 hours ago |
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upvoteby s-macke10 hours ago|
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Yes, I’ve tried it. For example, this was my winning entry from a year ago [0]. The LLM only performs trivial obfuscation, not advanced transformations.

For example:

  if (x == 1 || x == 2) { ...
can be transformed into:

  if (!(2+x*x-3*x)) { ...
An LLM will do this if you explicitly ask it to, but not on its own.

[0] https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2024/macke/p...

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upvoteby tromp9 hours ago|
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One of the main instruments of obfuscation (and the way to get more out of the size constraints) is making the code as short as possible, so in that example you'd prefer

    if (!(x/2-1)) { ...
EDIT: Oops, confused the original with x==2 || x==3. Instead, we can use !(x-1>>1), which precedence rules parse as !((x-1)>>1).
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upvoteby extrano849 hours ago|
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I checked this in an online C-compiler and it is not equivalent to x==1 | x==2.

this statement is equivalent to x==2 | x==3.

For example, x=3, 3/2 = 1 then 1-1 = 0 so that !(0) is 1 or true. Also for x=1, 1/2 = 0 then 0-1 = -1 and !(-1) = 0 or false.

I agree with your point in general though about size constraints.

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upvoteby Mankaninen9 hours ago|
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extrano84 already found some errors but also 0 will fail and if x is int (instead of unsigned int) all negative numbers will also fail (but so will the original s-macke obfuscation as well).
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upvoteby alienbaby9 hours ago|
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It's pretty easy to see what that does though, even if it is shorter. Wouldn't the other approach be more obfuscated?
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upvoteby fooker9 hours ago|
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Not sure what you mean by advanced transformations but I got these versions from ChatGPT without explicit instructions.

  if(x-1<2&&x)...
  if((1<<x)&6)...
  if(x<3&x)...
  if(3%x&&x<3)...
  if(!((x-1)*(x-2)))
  if(!(x^1|x^2))...
  if(!(x*x-3*x+2))
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upvoteby listeria4 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby nsoonhui9 hours ago|
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But then we all know that LLM has come a long way since one year ago.

Are you sure they still can't do it?

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upvoteby lifthrasiir9 hours ago|
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Just two months ago I tried to write a short K code with Claude Opus 4.6, only to find that while it had sufficient knowledge about K vocabularies it didn't try to make good use of them. K is, while slightly obscure and obfuscated, a real programming language and certainly better known than obfuscated programming. I don't have high hope for IOCCC-grade obfuscation.
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