Obfuscated code

I’m doing a project on MD5 collisions for my parallel computing class and, like all cryptography, the code involves a lot of hex numbers (in standard notation, 0xf00d, 0xbeef, etc.) which naturaly makes parts of the code difficult to read. That’s simply the nature of the algorithm. Some programmers (often just mathematicians) insist on making the code even more illedgible with things like this:

while (counter < (1 << 9))

The bigger problem is that when I see something like that I’m confused; I am both impressed by their cleverness (that loops while counter is less than 512) but also annoyed by their needless obfuscation. I guess one could argue that a left shift is more ledgible, because if it were a number larger than 10 or so, people wouldn’t know the significance. Who really knows of the top of their head that 262144 is 2^18? So, in the end, it’s not necessarily just obfuscation but really, most programmers will recognize at least up to 2^10 and those who know the internets should know 2^16 as well.