This month saw the state round of OzCLO, or the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad. High school students from all over Perth poured into UWA to solve tough puzzles and problems. It was great to see kids getting fired up about linguistics, I must say.
The peak moment for me was seeing one student stare for ten long seconds at the problem on syntax (which I wrote), and then silently mouth, “WHAT?!?”
Here’s a taste of the kinds of problems they had to face.
One of these two Egyptian hieroglyphic cartouches represents the name of Cleopatra. Which one is it, and whose name is in the other cartouche?
(No spoilers in comments, please.)
There are more sample problems here, if you get hooked.
29 March 2009 at 2:33 pm
I have absolutely no idea.
29 March 2009 at 8:25 pm
easy peasy 🙂
29 March 2009 at 8:47 pm
I think I might have a lost career here. Apart from the ones that involved numbers and the one about computation, I found them all pretty easy. But then my father was a linguist and spoke over 30 languages and used to show me etymological sources in dictionaries for fun … fascinating puzzles though – I enjoyed that.