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Geek 'N Latin

Confound 'Em

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Confound 'Em.

Update: Final Round Results are declared.

Tutorials are available to help you get started.

An Online Brainfcuk Interpreter.
The Brainfuck Developer IDE

Sick of those cascading tabs and well-behaved braces? It's time you break the shackles and let loose the spaghetti coder inside! With creativity and a taste for technical insanity being the only pre-requisites, arm yourself to take on your twisted binary counterparts in the arena to obfuscate, brain-fuck, reverse engineer and whirl your way to victory.

Event Details:

This event challenges the expertise of the participant in code obfuscation and algorithm design, by subjecting them to conventional coding problems, with unconventional technical bottlenecks. Code obfuscation involves the usage of various syntactical and logical methods to make the code as hard to interpret as possible, and what you'll need to know to get started obfuscating are just the basics of C programming.

Esoteric programming languages are those that hold no practical value whatsoever, and are just a fun and challenging way to do your conventional coding. Brainfuck is one, which has a syntax of just eight punctuation marks. Since the conventional C/C++ algorithms bite the dust in this domain, you'll need to be able to unshackle yourself from the grip of your previous knowledge and think of a fresh, new way to navigate the bottleneck at hand.

Resources:

More comprehensive tutorials and code examples for both code obfuscation and Brainfuck, as well as tutorials and links to the tools that'll help you get started coding is now available at Geek 'N Latin Tutorials

Team Specification:

Maximum Team Size: 2

Members can be from different educational institutes.

Eligibility:

All students with a valid identity card of their respective educational institutes are eligible to participate in Geek 'N Latin in Quark 2010.

Certification policy:

The certification policy would be in agreement with the General Certification Policy of all events as decided by the Quark Core Committee.

Rounds:

Two on-line off-campus elimination rounds; open to all.

Final on-campus round; for the selected participants.

Elimination Rounds:

A team may participate in either or both the on-line phases

They will be held in the first and last week of January 2009. Keep watching this space for tutorials and notices.

The problems in the on-line elimination round will be of three types and will check the participants' expertise in C programming, code obfuscation and Brainfcuk.

The first set of problems will consist of some conventional C programming problems.

The second set will consist of problems to write obfuscated C code for some simple tasks, like printing all the prime numbers upto a given number.

The third set will test the algorithmic design skills of the participant by subjecting them to conventional coding problems in Brainfuck.

Top 11 teams will be selected for the on-campus rounds.

Final Round:

This round will pitch the participants head to head and to challenge their ability to obfuscate code as well as reverse engineer or de-obfuscate that of their opponents.

First, two tasks will be assigned to each team. They will have to write the obfuscated C code for one, and Brainfuck program for the other, within the given time constraint.

Then each team will be given the obfuscated C and Whirl code written by the other teams, which they will have to reverse engineer.

Participants will have no Internet access.

Although a C compiler and Whirl interpreter will be provided in the first half, the participants will be just provided with a text editor in the second half.

Ties, if any, will be resolved by a simple tie-breaker problem statement, following the same format of this round.

Judging Criteria:

Online Elimination Rounds:

The C and Brainfcuk programs will be checked for their output. The most obfuscated code will get most number of points. The obfuscated codes will be judged on the following basis:
Number of steps used which are relevant obfuscating transformations.
Size of the program. (Maximum acceptable size is 3072 bytes. Programs of size greater than this value will not be accepted)
Execution time.

For further details, please go through the obfuscation judging criteria

Final Round:

For the first half, points will be awarded to the degree of obfuscation of C code as in the online rounds.
For the second half participants will be awarded points for correct explanation and interpretation of each step used by the other teams in obfuscation.

Note: All the C codes will be tested in a “Code::Blocks 8.02” IDE using “GNU GCC Compiler”.