Obfuscated Intelligence Award: Mark Schnitzius Mark Schnitzius 1700 Woodbury Rd. #1208 Orlando, FL 32828 USA Judges' comments: To run: make schnitzi ./schnitzi file where: file a file containing some text After this program prints the contents of 'file', ask it some questions related to the text. The author suggests the following questions when using schnitzi.info: Who is Mark Schnitzius? What exactly does this program do? What language is it written in? Has the Loch Ness monster really been captured? Who was Hitler? Were the NASA moon landings faked? Is it true that Elvis is alive? Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously? NOTE: The author may also be contacted at: marks@aldrin.ksc.nasa.gov We suggest you try using the body (minus the header and signature line) of a Usenet article. You might want to try something from alt.flame. :-) Selected notes from the author: I wanted to write a program that would read in a text file in natural language (such as English) and answer questions about that text file. I thought this might be a complicated task, and I was right -- it took me over 800 bytes. Of course, it doesn't always work, but that's AI for you. This program accepts the name of a text file as the first parameter. For example, to run it on the supplied data file called 'info' you would type 'schnitzi info'. It echoes the file, then gives you a prompt where you may type in questions about that text. The more words you use which are actually present in the text file, the better results you get. You'll need to hit to break out of the program. Just hitting at the prompt will reprint the paragraph. If you're curious as to how it works, I guess you could feed in the source as the input file and ask "How does this work?" at the prompt, but I'm not guaranteeing any results... Compilation notes: o The use of 'strcasecmp' may be non-standard. 'strcmp' can be substituted for it, with a slight performance penalty. o This program depends on the first command-line parameter, typically called argv[0], to hold the name of the executable. It is my under- standing that this property of argv[0] is not guaranteed on some systems. This program is obfuscated in the following ways: o It uses a hidden string to test for punctuation; o The layout, variable names, and expression format have been chosen in such a way as to cause visual confusion; o It uses uses external 'system' calls to echo the text file and break up the question into individual words with a recursive call; o It uses a clever hack to simulate artificial intelligence. The text for the info file, by the way, consists largely of headlines from the Weekly World News. Copyright (c) 1993, Landon Curt Noll & Larry Bassel. All Rights Reserved. Permission for personal, educational or non-profit use is granted provided this this copyright and notice are included in its entirety and remains unaltered. All other uses must receive prior permission in writing from both Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel.