The IOCCC, as it's familiarly known, is back after a four-year gap, giving the entrants more time to come up with some remarkably devious code.

This week, the results for the IOCCC 2024 were announced, with a record 23 winners. It's the first IOCCC in four years, but you shouldn't take that to imply it's as regular as the Olympics. In fact, almost nothing about the IOCCC is regular: this was the 28th edition of the event, and celebrated its 40th anniversary.

We confess that we have not yet studied the source of all the winners closely, but we have already got some personal favorites. Adrian Cable won the "Prize in murky waters" for this magnificent effort:

Dr Cable offered this 23 second Youtube clip by way of explanation. The chances are that you may already be familiar with it, but if not, it won't take you long. We also confidently predict that it will not help in any way.

Whatever you think the code does when run, you're wrong, but you're not going to believe what it actually does generate. Don't try to copy and paste it from the above, because as well as flagrant abuse of the C programming language, it also contains flagrant abuse of Unicode encoding. The IOCCC organizers have their own explanation, which will show you what this infernal masterpiece does in fact do.