Over the past three months, I took part in the Kaggle Code Golf competition as part of jailctf merger. The event recently ended, and to our surprise, we ended up taking second place and walking away with a $20,000 prize 🤑.

If you’ve never heard of code golf, it’s a kind of recreational sport where you try to solve a programming task in as few bytes as possible. Despite being a silly exercise, I think it promotes a really interesting combination of algorithms, math, and cursed language tricks.

Kattis is one of those popular competitive programming sites, where people go to practice ICPC-style coding problems. I don’t use it personally, but a while ago I found out they have a shortest code leaderboard. The easiest problem on the site is called Hello World!, where the task is simply to print Hello World! to STDOUT.

It seems straightforward at first, but if you check the leaderboards, the shortest submission to the problem is an astonishing 5 characters long (in Bash)! Common sense tells us that Hello World! costs 12 characters alone, so this score should not be possible from an entropy perspective…

Hey! This is just a test post. Maybe I’ll have cool stuff to put on here someday…

For now, here’s a Hello, World! program in Brainfuck:

+[-->-[>>+>-----<<]<--<---]>-.>>>+.>>..+++[.>]<<<<.+++.------.<<-.>>>>+.