Contest Rules

The final rules are not yet agreed upon; this is a draft version.

The Brainfuck implementation

There is no standard for Brainfuck, and different implementations usually vary in memory size, cell size and wraparound rules. The implementation used for Brainfuck Golf is a rather strict one.

The only instructions used are < > - + , . [ ], anything else is a comment and not considered a part of the program (including newlines).
No special terminating character is used.
Cells can contain values from 0 to 255.
Incrementing 255 or decrementing 0 results in a fatal error.
Memory is unbounded to the right.
Attempting to go to the left of the starting cell is a fatal error.
"," returns 0 on EOF.
Unbalanced brackets are a fatal error.
After EOF is reached ("," returns 0), further atempt to use "," will result in a fatal error.
If the problem specifies that input is not used, "," cannot be used at all. Trying to use it will result in, you guessed it, a fatal error.
Programs are limited to 64K.

Scoring

The shortest (fewest Brainfuck instructions) program wins. If many authors submit the same program, they all win.

If two or more different programs are tied for the first place, the one that uses the least memory wins. This is determined by the rightmost position of the memory pointer reached during execution.

If programs are still tied, each one is considered a winner.

back