The printf statement in C/C++ (and other languages) is a fairly innocuous command that prints information to the screen (or any other output stream). Reading over JWZ’s blog post (The Turing Police say “X Wins”) I found that I was mistaken as it is much more powerful than that. In fact, a single printf statement in a loop can be used to create a full interactive game of tic-tac-toe and this is demo’d by Nicholas Carlini, who has implemented this and you can view the code over at their GitHub Repo: tic-tac-toe in a single call to printf.
Apparently, this was inspired by the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The repo has an explanation on how this works and I am still going through it to wrap my head around how it works and understand it fully. Check it out if you have some time.
– Suramya