Hi,

In the winning entry there is no cast or "conversion" per se. It has one C file that calls a function and another C file that implements the function, with a mismatch between the types of the call and the implementation. Neither file by itself is performing any conversion or doing something wrong that can be caught by static analysis; the bug is caused by a mismatch between the code in two object files. This would only be caught by a tool that would examine the two files together, but it would not be caught by the compilation of either part.

We've actually seen a number of past entries that used this same basic trick to mismatch a call and an implementation. A previous winning entry managed to redefine the time() function as time_t time(void) instead of time_t time(time_t *ptr), avoiding a compiler warning by using the extern keyword. That's a neat trick because barely anyone uses the argument to time(), and after writing t=time(NULL) hundreds of times, it's easy to completely miss a call like t=time(). This caused a call to time() with the wrong number of arguments, so that another variable on the stack was used to hilarious effect.

Hi,

I didn't mention it on the page, but the C file that #includes that header doesn't #include math.h, so there is no typedef overridden. A second C file #includes math.h without #including that header.

They added a feature to the filesystem that let you insert a music CD and see the tracks as WAV files, so you could rip the CD simply by dragging them to your desktop.

I remember that because I tried to play a CD by selecting all the tracks in the folder and double-clicking, only to hear the OS play all the CD tracks at the same time.

That's not a defunct link to previous entries, but a defunct link to a previous version of the contest site. I've un-defuncteded it to more recent previous version of the contest site, but soon that will also be defunctitated or defunctified, or defunctored.

You can see the previous entries by scrolling down, or by selecting "past years" from the menu bar on the web page.

I mostly used BeOS in grad school because I liked alternative operating systems, but several times I'd try to port my work to Windows or Windows NT and find myself astonished at how impossible my this stuff was to do on other computers at the time (late 1990s.) NT's architecture and event processing often prohibited the sort of real-time audio and video apps I was writing, and the API standing between me and the data was much more restrictive.

In retrospect, I think a number of my research successes were accidentally due to using an OS that would let me implement some really nutty ideas.

Is it really appropriate to use average wages, instead of median wages? The average wage doesn't change if everyone takes a huge pay cut while a CEO ends up giving himself a 1000-percent raise.

Java is an OK language, but it's kind of bureaucratic and boring. I can't think of a better way to suck all the magic out of a fantasy game than to have the spells written in Java---except maybe having the kids produce an ER diagram and a set of tables in Boyce-Codd normal form.

At the very least, they could do without the pointless punctuation. Does a spell really have to have semicolons and empty parentheses to denote that the spell is imperative?

If they don't email me a phone number attached as a word document, then they're more welcome than the usual idiots I have to see on my computer.

Baby boomers or not, the number of PhD graduates far exceeds the number of professors due to the simple logistics of teaching. Suppose you start a professorship at 30, and retire at 70. How many PhD students do you advise per year? Let's say 1.5 just to be on the low side. And suppose they each take 5 years to graduate. You just cranked out a dozen PhDs, and created one faculty opening by retiring. One should expect an advanced degree to increase one's job prospects, but it's numerically silly to expect, specifically, a faculty position. This is why every university hires people with degrees from an even better university---not because NIU frowns on NIU grads, but because the market for the teacher's job is so competitive that only the best CVs get in.

No matter how sophisticated the algorithm, the set of strings that get graded an A is bound to contain some weird and illegible elements. They probably won't be too hard to find by inspection of the algorithm and its training data. It will only take a few widely publicized examples of meaningless essays with a high auto-grade to cast doubts on this method of grading, no matter how effective it is in the common case.

I put the contest rules in a pdf, at http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~scraver/underhanded/ until the main site is back up again.