The Craziest Coding Contest Ever
Chapters11
Showcases an ASI art piece that recreates the Doctor Who intro screen, rated highly but placed in S category.
An exuberant tour of the wildest, most mind-bending Code Golf entries from The PrimeTime's look at the International Afuscated CC Code Contest.
Summary
The PrimeTime dives into the world of Code Golf with a charismatic tier-list romp through some of the most jaw-dropping entries from the International Afuscated CC Code Contest. He comments on the visual magic of ASI art, the surprising cleverness of each program, and the sheer variety—from a Doctor Who intro recreated in tiny code to a Game Boy emulator that fits a full terminal game within a few hundred lines. Along the way he celebrates the mind-blowing feats (like a three-language polyglot program and a self-contained patch-diff quine chain) and isn’t shy about ranking his favorites with a mix of enthusiasm and honest critique. The host even admits bias toward visually spectacular or technically monstrous pieces, and keeps the energy high with playful commentary and quick dives into what each entry actually does. You’ll hear him react to “S” and “S+” level coups, laugh at the audience-friendly misfires, and marvel at the sheer ingenuity on display. It’s a celebratory, nerdy celebration of creativity under extreme constraints. Expect lots of nerdy specifics: a top-spinning “stamp” program, a 2048 game on a Game Boy shell, and the infamous L-branch container that forks into a real Linux environment. If you love tiny programs with gigantic ideas, this video is a goldmine of inspiration and awe.
Key Takeaways
- Tiny code can render complex, real-world outputs—an ASI art-driven piece can both display art and simulate a full phenomenon (e.g., a 3D top simulation) with surprisingly few characters.
- A polyglot entry can be run in Ruby, Pearl, or C and morph its behavior depending on the language, illustrating language-rich obfuscation and multi-language portability in one artifact.
- Self-referential, patch-based quine chains can hide diff tooling inside patches and yield outputs after 25 patches—an homage to Larry Wall and classic Unix tooling that blows typical expectations.
- Game Boy and retro-terminal recreations demonstrate that a compact program can recreate full games (2048, a Game Boy-like Tetris/2048 combo) with authentic hardware-aesthetic styling.
- The “L” entry pushes boundary by forking into a minimal Linux container that can even simulate a fork bomb, highlighting extreme feats of systems engineering under source-code constraints.
- Entries balance spectacle and engineering: ASI art, output fidelity, and clever obfuscation all play roles in ranking, but the most memorable moments often come from unexpected, jaw-dropping demonstrations.
- Viewers new to code golf will gain insight into how constraints spur extreme creativity—from obfuscated art to retro-game emulation, and from polyglot tricks to kernel-level ideas.
Who Is This For?
Ideal for developers and tech enthusiasts who enjoy puzzle-like programming challenges, retro-computing aesthetics, and extreme-code artistry. If you’ve ever wondered how tiny snippets can produce big, mesmerizing results, this video is right up your alley.
Notable Quotes
""You've probably heard of Code Golf, right? Well, did you know that there's actually a world championship in Code Golf called the International Afuscated CC Code Contest?""
—Opening tease setting the tone for the tier-list journey through spectacular submissions.
""This lovely piece of code right there actually recreates the original intro screen for Doctor Who.""
—First jaw-dropping example showing how ASI art ties directly to the output.
""I stood up and started clapping... I by myself, I clapped at the screen.""
—Shows the emotional reaction to standout entries and the video’s enthusiastic vibe.
""The most mind-blowing thing you’re ever going to see""
—Emphasizes the scale of some feats and the video’s hype language.
""This is an emulator capable of running a full modern Linux system with minimal set of features""
—Describes the legendary L entry and its container-like capabilities.
Questions This Video Answers
- What is Code Golf and why do people compete in it at the International Afuscated CC Code Contest?
- How can a tiny program generate a Game Boy emulator in terminal style?
- What makes polyglot code special in obfuscated code challenges?
- Why is the L entry considered so technically impressive despite its minimalist code?
- How do ASI art visuals relate to the function of small code programs in these contests?
Code GolfInternational Afuscated CC Code ContestASI artpolyglot codeobfuscated codegame emulationUnix toolsLarry Wallpatch toolquine chain
Full Transcript
You've probably heard of Code Golf, right? Well, did you know that there's actually a world championship in Code Golf called the International Afuscated CC Code Contest? Now, I've seen some photos, and I'm sure you've seen some of these float around over the years on social media, but I did not realize just how amazing these programs actually are and the fact that this could produce anything at all, let alone an amazing program. So, today we are going to be doing a tier list. Yes, you heard me correct. A tier list on the most beautiful asy art along with functional program you have ever seen.
And honestly, there was one of them that when I played it, I stood up and started clapping. I I by myself, I clapped at the screen. These are going to be some of the most mindblowing things you're ever going to see. All right, so first up is this lovely one. Now, some of you probably can take a guess as to what it does. Yes, every single ASI art is also a bit of a clue as to what it does. Look at that. Look at how amazing that is. But wait for it. Just wait for it.
Doctor Who. That's right. This lovely piece of code right there actually recreates the original intro screen for Doctor Who. Now, here's the hard part about all this is that every one of these programs are amazing, and it's hard not to just give them all the highest tier possible. But I think in the spirit of fair competition, I'm going to put this one under the S category. It's pretty good. Okay, but there's still several that are even more mindblowing. All right, next up is this beauty. Look at it. What could it be? What could this one be about?
It prints the current moon cycle. That's right. Today's moon cycle is a waning crescent. And what you see right there is in fact a waning crescent. To me, the thing that's just so mind-blowing about this is there's like there's like no code here, dog. How does this even work? As cool as it is though, I am only going to rate this one as a B. Yes, I know your mind's probably blown right now, but that's Hey, I'm calling it. I think it's only a B. It's awesome, but it's not it it's not as cool, I guess, as it could be, even though there's so few characters.
I know. I can already feel it right now. I can already feel people getting on the keyboard making comments. You son of a I think it's the coolest thing ever. Don't worry, it gets so much better. Before we continue, thank you to the sponsors. Dad, could you teach me how to five code today? Does it look like I have time for that? Son, my database is down again. Oh, maybe tomorrow. Not again. Go long, son. Teach, got to go fast. Hey, teach. How do you have time to play with your kid? Isn't your database always down?
What do you mean? I chose Planet Scale, the database for the consumer who wants their downtime to be with their kid. Nice catch, son. Thanks for choosing Planet Scale. You're the best dad ever. No studies have confirmed Planet Scale makes you a better father, but it is a really good database. Hey, welcome back. Okay, so we got the lightning bolt next. Yes, the lightning bolt. This one, I mean, it I love the asy art. Okay, the asy art in this one is incredible. But what it does, it produces a nice little lightning strike on your screen.
Hey, that's kind of cool, right? And they're random each time. Look at that. Hey, little just little lightning strike, huh? For me, this one, it's going to have to be a D. I know we're in D category for a moment. Okay, I love the ASI art. It just didn't it just didn't deliver for me. Next up, what looks to be a stamp. Now, this one was the first one that truly blew my mind. I can already tell you even before you see it. Oh, baby, we're going up. Okay, we're going all the way up to S+ here.
I'm putting it in because when you see what happens here. Oh my goodness. What it does is you press a button and it spins a top. It reads the top shape from a file. You can provide any top. You can see right here how many uh revolutions per minute going on. It's going to fly up here. It's going super fast. It's going at a thousand. It simulates a top. You can design your own shape and it runs. Now, for me, this is just I I don't know. I thought this one was just so dang impressive because I can't even believe this actually works.
I can't even believe you could build a simulation in that few characters, let alone a simulation that I can just design whatever shape I want, and it just works. And there we go. It's crashing. Look at it go. Look at that. It looks so good. It's 3D asy. Now you can see why this deserves the S+ category. I mean, this thing has to be one of the coolest programs I have ever seen. And I'm still blown away that like this is the code. This is it. That's that's all it that's all it takes. Next up is I guess a bunch of signs.
The addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division sign. All right. So this this program, what it does is you give it what it's allowed to use, a zero, and then what numbers it has to calculate. So when I press enter, it actually figures out. Okay, only using 77 77 and 77 777. I will make that number by doing this. Hey, that's pretty neat. It just figures out how to do things like that. I'm I'm impressed by that. I have no idea how the math works, let alone how you would fit it just in the that many lines of like how how did it how do they do it?
It blows my mind. But at the end of the day, I kind of put this one into the moon category, okay? the B category because it is very technically impressive. It's just not as much of a visual spectacle. It doesn't capture me like the other ones. Yes, I'm going to be a little bit biased on some visual spectacles. Okay. All right. I love this one. This one is from right to left or at least it gives the appearance of being a right to left program. All right. So, when I run this one, it's actually a game.
You can use wasi. You can dodge all these things. Look at it. Look at it. Look at this. Is not a gaming keyboard. Okay. As you can see, you can also shoot. Look at us go. Look at that go. Look at that go. Look at that. I'm shooting. I'm not dying. I'm not going to die. I'm not going to die just by sitting in one place and shooting. Okay, I died. So, the program itself that was I can't like I I'm pretty sure that there's at least 15% of my audience that couldn't write that program by hand, let alone write a program that looks like it's right to left.
But, I will say that the visual spectacle of the code doesn't feel asm. So, that kind of goes against it. But, the game the game is so dang good. I got to do it. I got to A tier this one. Okay, I got two A tier this one. All right, so the next one is this. Look at look at all of this. So so much obuscation inside of the middle of it. It says relax. Now remember all the art of course is some sort of indicator typically what you're going to see. This program is a relaxation sound generator.
May take 5 to 10 seconds to generate. All right. So, where do we put relax? I mean, obviously the ASI art is pretty cool. I love that the ASI art is directly tied into what it produces, which is this really relaxing sound. And then the sound waves, like the waters, the water actually sounds really good. Like it sounds really, really good and it generates it. So, I just I I feel like this has to be an S tier item, right? You got the full package here. You got the art tied in with the the result, and it's just pretty dang high quality.
This is This feels This feels like S tier to me. All right. So, this next one's a bit harder to explain. You can see a dydx right here. So, we got a little bit of difference with respect difference of y with respect to x. Is that how you read these? It's been so long. Anyways, either way, you can tell that there's going to be some sort of derivative property to this one. Now, this one needs a little bit more explaining because what it does, it's a bit mind-blowing. So, this program is a self-modifying quine chain that hides a diff tool inside of a patch tool.
So, you actually use the patch tool to patch itself 25 times. And at the end of patching yourself 25 times, you'll actually get a diff tool at the end. And what makes this program so cool is that it says right here, Larry Wall. It's a tribute to Larry Wall, creator of the patch command and Pearl programming language and the winner of the international auscation C challenge. As you can see, he actually did win right here, which is a D'vorak keyboard emulator. You already know that I'm pretty impressed by that one. You can even go check out his code right here.
Now, this is actually just Larry Wall writing some pretty standard Larry Wall code. And this was two years before Pearl was invented. The man was writing Pearl before Pearl existed. It reminds me of a brief, incomplete, and mostly inaccurate history of programming languages. Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking, Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random, but an example program in a programming language that God wants his prophet Larry Wall to design Pearl is born. Since there's not really much of an output for it, and it's kind of like a super cool tribute one, I figured I'd put this one I put it, you know, in a C category.
Like, it's a technically impressive feat. I there's there's no universe exists that I could program that one, but I don't feel like it's again visually as impressive. The ASI does match the program which does rate it higher, but it just doesn't uh it doesn't do it for me. Okay, I know this is a B. Hey, tier list, they're biased. Okay, back off me. So, this one we have ourselves a little bit of a skull. Okay, I wonder what's going to happen with this one. It's actually a video game. Cycle through target choices before firing. Kill lowest matching invader.
All right, here we go. So, I Okay, I got to get a three. Fire. Wait, fire. There we go. Oh, yeah. Yes. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Yes. Yes. Oh no. Oh crap. All right, I did pretty good. Okay, I got some points. But hey, that's a pretty cool little Hey, that's a pretty cool little game. I like the ASI art. Fun little game. Pretty neat. But overall, again, not a huge visual spectacle. I'm going to put I'm putting in the D category. Okay, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again. The ASI art does match the experience, but there's not much to the experience.
It doesn't feel as technically impressive as some of the other ones. I bet you at this point, midway through here, that there's a lot of people right now that are losing their mind. Okay. Hey, calm down. Hey, this Hey, this is my tier list. Okay, go ahead. Tell me. Tell me how you feel. You won't. All right. So, this next one, look at this. Look at that. It looks kind of like a tree or a smoke stack. It's a little bonsai tree simulator. Look at that guy go. It's kind of peaceful, you know? It's like this.
This would actually make an amazing little, you know, text screen saver. And honestly, it ends a little soon for me. You know, I I uh I understand how it feels. I wish it would last longer, though. You know, me and you, bonsai tree. Me and you, little bonsai tree. You know what? We're done. We're done here. We're done. We're moving on. All right. So, I love the Aski art. I love that it plays and builds a little tree. It's a beautiful running program. Beautiful as Oh my gosh. For me, this just had that really impressive feel to it.
I just wish it would have lasted a little bit longer. You know, take your time a little bit. So, I'm going to put I'm going to put it in the A category. Even though I loved it, it just didn't do it for me. I know there's a lot of you out there, anime waifuss, okay, this one's probably hitting hard for you, but this one is particularly impressive. This one is one of the few ones that like my mind can't even comprehend how they made this. So, this is what they refer to as a polyglot piece of code.
Now you've probably heard the term polyglot before describing somebody who has like say many doctorates in a certain in different you know fields or someone who can program really well in many different languages typically you know like a a poly language a polygot language specialist right you get the idea but this the code itself is a polyglot what does that mean well here's the thing so how this program works is you take some input and you pipe it into the program when you do that it can cut out a little one of the lines. So you say, "Hey, cut out line 50." Right?
So this is kind of like akin to the old text editors. But here's the thing about the program. If you take the program itself and you cut out the first line, the program goes from a cut tool to head. If you're not familiar with head, head displays the first few lines of any like of an input stream or a file. If you cut the last line, it becomes tail. It then displays the last few characters. Now, here's where it gets mind just boggling. Okay, you can run the program with Ruby. That's right. You don't even have to make it with C anymore.
You can just raw dog it with Ruby. And apparently, if you raw dog it with Ruby, guess what you get? You get like the complement of head and tail. Also, if that doesn't bother you enough, you can also run the program with Pearl. In other words, this program is a collection of linebased cutting tools. So for an example this program it's going to cut line two of a sequence of five. When I press enter you can see 1 3 4 5. You can also cut the other direction. 1 2 3 four is missing five. You can then run the program as Ruby and bada bing bada boom.
Look at this. You now have a Ruby program. Hey Ruby program. Hey take the first two. Now remember Ruby program inverts it. So it's not take the first two. It's skip the first two. And then of course you can go the other direction. Skip the last two. The layout of this code is based on Ubel from this book. It's called Beyond the Journeys End. It's for her ability to cut just about everything. That is who this lovely lady is. For me, I've never listen for me. I've never even thought of the fact that you could write a program that could run in three separate languages.
For me, that the technical feat of this one is so impressive that I just have to I cuz I'm I'm a rookie in this category. Okay. I don't know a lot about obfuscation, but the fact that you could do this and the program could look that beautiful and the output could be that technically amazing, it's just like all of it blows my mind. This one was not a visual spectacle, which goes against everything I've said thus far, but it's it's so technically mindblowing. It has to be here cuz I didn't even know this was possible.
The next one should just kind Look at this. It should just fill your little heart with joy. Is that a Game Boy? It is. Look, it even has like the little speakers down here. such attention to detail. This one is absolutely incredible. So, this Game Boy, I bet you can kind of guess what it does. Okay, it requires a lot of rows, so you can kind of barely read this, but as you can see, we have a few different options right here. So, we have Game Boy controls. Look at this. 2048. Let's go. I don't even know what the controls are.
Let's Let's rock and roll. Okay. 2048. Okay. Okay. Uh down over. This is actually so good. This is so Look at this. Would you Would you Would you just Would you look at it? Okay. Are you Are you looking at this? Are you actually seeing what I am seeing right now? I don't think you are. So, this is a Tetris optimized terminal game boy emulator. That's right. a Game Boy emulator fitting in this much code. This thing is just it's just the best. Hands down. Like this is so incred how do people even create this?
Crazier part is how do you even debug this? Like what does what's the strategy? There must exist some sort of program in which can make C look absolutely disgusting. But this is just I can't I can't even believe it. So, it should be no surprise that this one's going into the S+ category. Okay, this is S+ for days. This is the S++. Sorry, my bad. I I misspoke. I misspoke. Very impressed. Hey, sorry. I was sorry. I was not aware of your game. All right, next one up is this beautiful little calculator. Look at it.
Geez. I wonder what it's going to do. All right, so as you can see right here, if you run program two, it prints out the the number two. If you do 2 + 2 minus 1, you would of course get three. 8 trillion divided by 14 million7 + 156. Boom. Yes. All of that somehow in here. It's in it's it's right there. Don't you see the trillion? What? How does it even work? How did it understand the number? That is what blows my mind. I can't even I can't even consider reality right now. I feel like I'm feel like I'm being lied to.
actively as we speak. This can't this can't be the same code, right? And so for me, this one, as someone who once had to build a calculator on stream that is very it's a very difficult one and there's so many little edge cases and so it was very impressive. The ASI art very beautiful, the output very cool. I'm I'm going to give it a B. Okay, it was awesome. Super impressed. But we we can all agree that's that's not S+ material. Okay. All right. Big old modulo N. Look at all that. I don't know what's going on in here, but there's a there's there appears to be a lot of function calls, macros being executed, modulo, and I don't even like I can't even make a guess as to what this program does based on the ASI art.
It seems very confusing. All right, so this program, you echo in a series of moves into the program, and when you hit enter, it plays those moves in order as a game of tic-tac-toe and tells you who wins. That's right. It plays tic-tac-toe. This code right here, that code. Who are these people? Okay, I'm I don't think chat gypy would have any idea what this code does. Hey, you can you can ignore that. Don't don't don't look at that. All right, so I pasted the code in, turned on proinking. That's right. This is some pretty serious model computation going on.
Now, obviously, the only problem that I can see is that since this is on a public GitHub repository, there might be some sort of identification that it could pull somewhere deep inside of its weights and be like, um, this is actually one of the many winners of the international auscated sea challenge. Look at this. Chad Jippidity on proinking was actually able to see this. The visible behavior is a two-player tic-tac-toe game. It clears the terminal and draws a 3x3 board. Prompts for squares one through nine and detects a win. Chad GPT, I'm imp. I Hey, I'm impressed.
All right, so I you know I I'm going to rate this one low. Okay, for me it didn't feel as cool as the other ones. Okay, I'm putting I feel like I actually have to explain it to everybody. The fact is is that when you look at what it did comparatively to everything else, it just doesn't feel as mystical, if you will. And so I got Hey, therefore, I got to give it the D. Okay, I'm boys. I'm giving it the D. All right, so now we're down to the last six. Seven. The last seven.
These there's some pretty cool ones in this one. Okay, the these ones start getting pretty mindblowing. All right, first up is this right here, the vortex. Look at that vortex. Look at how beautiful it looks. It's all commented out. So, it kind of has this like cool little star shape into it. It actually looks like a vortex and then it spells a vortex right here. I'm not going to lie to you. It's pretty neat. Okay. Hey, it's pretty neat. But it's what it does that is. You just kind of have to see it yourself. This is the input right here.
The international aus Code Challenge going on right here. And as you can see, we're going to pipe that in. And then we're going to pipe it on. This does some encoding onto it. Watch the encoding. Now you uncode. Tell me that is not awesome. Tell me that is not incredible. Look at this. This is the source code right here. This is the source code that we are looking at right now. And when you run it, look It actually offuscates that top part and then deoffuscates it and goes back and forth. Look that you can actually go both directions.
This program is a spectacle, people. I loved it. Like I understand that this one may not be the most impressive functionality ever, but for me it's just the spectacle of the ASI art, the spectacle of the output. It is a wow to the eyeballs. Oh my goodness gracious. I'm absolutely putting that in S+ right now. Okay, for me that was the one. All right, that was the one that did it. That tickled me right where I needed to be tickled. Okay, and next up, Z3. Now, I this one I didn't I didn't really get like I I don't really understand the ASI art.
I bet you there's somebody that's old enough that they could figure out what this means. This is a callback, it turns out, to a bit older of a game. So, for me, this did not land. So, when you run the program first, you get to admire the source code of it. Very beautiful. But when you press it again, you're actually presented a textbased game. That's right. This thing runs a bunch of different famous, well-known textbased games, including MiniZorg, Advent, Curses, Fantasy, Dimension. And when you play them, let's just uh start off with number zero. There we go.
So, you can do quit, save, or restore, which means you can continue to play. And it loads in these files. It reads them from disk which have these just large branching narrative games such as this. West of house. You are standing in an open field west of a white house with a boarded front door. You could circle the house to the north or the south. There is a small mailbox here. North. North of the house. You are facing the north side of the white house. There's no door here and all the windows are boarded up.
A narrow path winds north through the trees. As you can see, this is just a textbased adventure, so you could go on whatever the adventure is that has been in put into this game. Very impressive. So, this one is super cool. Obviously, the games themselves are is not stored in the source code, just the engine that runs it. And so, it is pretty neat. I liked it. Uh, but for me, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting comes from the files. And I don't know how much of the heavy lifting comes from the source code itself.
Obviously, there's a lot of symbols there. the obuscation through the roof. Visually mind-boggling, but ASI art didn't really like land very hard to me. And the games themselves, maybe they could be a lot of fun, but they're also just the extra files. So, it just, you know, it just didn't it just didn't tickle that spot. You know, the spot I'm talking about, the good spot as they as the kids call it. All right. So, this next one, look at it. It's a tornado. You may have to a to a tornado. At least that's what I think it is.
Or maybe it's like a crazy looking roselike thing going on right there. Now, when you run this one though, look at what you see. That's right. It's like a tornado simulator. Look at it go. You have some sort of 3D cube spinning and then this tornado just in the middle and the colors going up. It's absolutely incred. I again blown away. I'm blown away right now. Look at this. I'm blowing. Okay, people. I'm being blown by the tornado. This thing is just a one-of-a-kind specialist. I love how they even have these like shapes. It's almost like some sort of pearlin noise.
How it kind of does that like undulation where it has high points and it distributes them into low points. Incredible. For me, this one was just such a spectacle. I loved it. The ASI art and the the simulation that runs is so aligned and it just again, you know, that tickling. I know I'm I'm a cheap I'm a sucker, okay? I'm a sucker for a sweet tickling and that one got me. So, I'm I'm S+ing it. Okay. I'm S+ing it. That one blew me away metaphorically and literally. All right, so the asy art to this one is pretty interesting.
You can see a scissor, a comb, and a clock. Apparently, there's a little bit of a challenge also within this code where you can actually make it behave a touch differently if you attempt to figure out how it works and how to change its behavior. I in fact did not do that because I kind of a rookie when it comes to C, let alone a fusated C. I don't I don't think I have it in me, okay? I don't got that Larry Wall inside of me. So, the program itself, an inverted clock, as you can see right here, that is my time right now.
That is the time I'm at. I'm at 4:18 and this thing is at well 4:18. Now, for whatever reason, this terminal that I have running right now is kind of like wigging out. The other ones didn't wig out for me, so I don't I don't know what's happening here, but this still it it looks pretty incredible. I don't really get the shape of this one. Like the the the hourglass side of things, but the the scissors must be because you have to cut something. The comb and the clock must be some sort of indication into what you need to cut and what it is.
But it just didn't land for me. So, I'm rating this one a little bit lower. Not not because it was cool, just because the ASI art didn't land for me. I just didn't really get it. But, you know, it's awesome, bro. I couldn't write that. All right. So, here's this next one. It has this nice little uh banner for the IOCCCC and what year it was on 2020. And when you run the program, you get the following. Star Wars, may the IOCC be with you. Honestly, for me, this one's actually shockingly impressive. A, they somehow were able to make ASI art look like the letters were like coming away from you.
But not only that, I one time asked an AI to make this exact same thing for me in a video game where it could actually use a graphics library and it got nowhere close. I mean, it was terrible. No, no, no, no, no. So, the fact that you can just Hello World and Galaxy, you can just run this program, provide whatever input you want, and it just floats away like this. Ah, for me, this one was pretty amazing. All right. So, for me, like, yeah, the ASI art I didn't really care for. It didn't I I feel like they could have done a better job like arranging it.
It should have almost looked like how it looks inside the program. At least be something that kind of widens out and kind of gives that perspective. I feel like that would have been a big more like a larger capture. Uh, obviously the technical feat of making ASI art look like it's leaning down and going away from you. Very cool. So, I'm going to give this it's a solid B for me. It's neat. Okay. Neat. But that's as far as that's as that's as far as I can give it to you. All right. Right now, can you guess what this one is?
Look at this. You have what appears to be a cog perhaps. Do you know what it is? I don't think you know what this one is. I don't think you're I don't think you are prepared for what you are about to see. That was a great pun. And I should somehow have prepared for that or made it earlier and I did not. As you can see right here, you can see 442. That is how big my screen is. So, if I were to zoom in, you can see that I have less and less and less of them all the way down to here.
And if I click one, boom. Hey, that's a three. Okay. Interesting. What happened if I click another one? Oh, I died. I clicked a mine. All right, let's try this again. I clicked. They're supposed to give you like kind of a little bit of an ocean on your first click. Okay, because now it's like I don't know. Let's just randomly click it. Okay, I got two and two. So, that puts me into kind of a bit of a pickle. Oh, dang. Emotional damage. Also, as you can see right here, I clicked on this one. It should have kind of opened up, don't you think?
There we go. Now, we got something opening. And as you can see, boom. So, good. So, there's probably two right here. If you write Can you right click on them to like select them? That'd be super cool. Look at that. Boom. What? Okay. So, I don't know what I just did there. Somehow that just marked a whole bunch of them yet. I don't feel like I did anything. Okay. And then I died. Well, okay. Well, okay then. So, this one is quite amazing. Obviously, the ASI art being a mine, that's what it's supposed to be.
I thought it was a cog. And the fact that it's it doesn't look like it's a fully working game of Mind Sweeper, but nonetheless, it's pretty radical. It fits in your terminal. However big your terminal is is how big the game is. That's pretty neat. But the fact that it does kind of have that bug and it's a little bit goofy. I'm I'm putting it in the C category. Okay. I mean, yes, it's it's very impressive. Obviously, the bug it got me. Okay. I didn't feel as like amazing about that. But now it's time for the last one.
A Roman numeral L as you can see. Okay. We're about to take the L. Now, I saved this one for last because I just don't think you're ready for what you're about to see. No. No, you're not. At least this was my personal favorite. Okay, this is this one. Okay, loved it. All right, so when you run the program, it says type halt at the prompt to terminate the program. When I press enter, it's actually a running container. That's right. You ever wonder what a fork bomb looks like? You can fork bomb yourself. Yo, you want to you want to like do a little RMRF from the root?
Yeah, you're allowed to do that. Boom. Look at that. Hey, you can't remove all those things. You're not allowed to do that. Great. Halt's not found anymore. Now I can't I can't quit the program. Okay, now now we're stuck. We're stuck inside of whatever this thing is. I love the judges remarks for this one. When we ran this entry for the first time in a virtual machine window, it felt like the VM rebooted. Then after the initial feeling had subsided, we were able to appreciate the entry in greater detail. The author's remark says, "This is an emulator capable of running a full modern Linux system with minimal set of features, including all of this." I I've never built a container, so I don't actually know how containers work.
I watched some talks where someone kind of walked through how you'd build a container and it all kind of made sense. But the fact that somehow this giant L produces a container in which I can fork bomb myself in and then it's just like walk it just I was flabbergasted by the level of technical feat in this one. Yes. Now the I have two problems with this one of course even though this one felt like my favorite. The first problem is that you can see the asy art. It just didn't hit home for me. I feel like maybe turn it into a penguin or something.
I don't know. Anyways, and the second one, it was obviously not as visually cool, but I'm still gonna put that in the S plus category just because the technical feat of it all is so beyond my ability to even comprehend how they did that. And now, I'm sure there's a few of you that actually know and understand it, but me, no. No, I don't. I've never done that before, let alone in C, let alone in that few characters, let alone making it into a gigantic L. Just want to throw out that Game Boy one more time.
That Game Boy emulator. Holy cow. Amazing. And then of course the program that was a Pearl Ruby and C program, the Polyglot code. I'm still I'm still like wowing by myself. I just like sit in the corner and just wow. I don't even I don't even know what that means. I hope you enjoyed this. There's tons of submissions. You should go through them. There's so many incredible ones and there was just too many to even actually go through, but I just figured I'd pull out some that I found particularly neat. And for those if you're if somehow you are one of the people that have built this and I put you in the D category, just remember you're more talented than I will ever be.
So your D is still my like S triple plus. Okay.
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