Comment by s-macke

10 hours ago

Yes, you haven’t tried it. LLMs are actually awesome at deobfuscation, but terrible at obfuscation. They just can’t do it yet.

They also lack the creativity needed for those entries. Obfuscation is only one part of it. Coming up with the idea is another. Many entries also have special qualities that make them true works of art.

12 comments

s-macke

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fooker  10 hours ago

> They just can’t do it yet.

Have you tried it or are you guessing this?

  • s-macke  9 hours ago

    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...

    • tromp  9 hours ago

      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).

      3 replies →

    • fooker  8 hours ago

      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))

      1 reply →