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The Rules are often deliberately written with [[loophole]]s that contestants are encouraged to find and abuse.<ref name=guidelines /> Entries that take advantage of loopholes can cause the rules for the following year's contest to be adjusted.<ref name=guidelines />
The most significant of the Rules is Rule 2a & 2b (originally Rule 1), gross & net source size limits. During the life time of the contest, Rule 2 has evolved<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.ioccc.org/faq.html#size_rule_history|title=Rule 2 Eras|publisher=International Obfuscated C Code Contest|website=IOCCC.org}}</ref> to accommodate subtle increases in source size limits. The 1984 contest started with a maximum source size of 512 bytes, which increased a few more times to 1536 bytes in 1991. In 1992, Rule 2 was split to distinguish between maximum overall size and maximum size ignoring white space and semicolons given certain conditions. In the early days, in order to make best use of space allowed, white space was stripped, often resulting in a compact blob of text, making it hard to read by humans, but served little purpose once passed through a C "pretty print" utility, which the judges did as part of their process. In 1992 the judges believed that form of obfuscation had played out and they wanted to encourage people to explore other ways of formatting the code, such as an ASCII image themed after the entry, or simply more traditionally indented C source. Around 2012/2013 the iocccsize(1)<ref>{{cite web|url=https://github.com/SirWumpus/iocccsize#history|title=iocccsize|publisher=Anthony C Howe|website=GitHub.com}}</ref> tool was adopted by the contest and tweaked to aid both contestants and judges apply the Rule 2b counting algorithm.
==Obfuscations employed==
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