What is NACLO?
An example
In sum, NACLO is boiling problem-solving and logical reasoning to its purest form, using language as a medium. NACLO is infamously hard to explain in words, so it's best to give an example.
Consider the following table of Turkish and English sentences. Can you fill in the blanks?
| Turkish | English |
|---|---|
| Zürafa koştu. | The giraffe ran. |
| Balık yüzdü. | The fish swam. |
| Zürafa atladı. | The giraffe jumped. |
| Fil koştu. | The elephant ran. |
| ? | The fish jumped. |
| Fil yüzdü. | ? |
Adapted from NACLO 2022/B, by Tom McCoy
These are linguistics problems: using deductive reasoning to infer patterns in languages. Now that you've seen an example, let's delve a bit deeper into what NACLO is all about.
General information
NACLO stands for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. It is a contest designed to challenge the problem-solving and analytical skills of high school students in the fields of linguistics and computational thinking. Participants don't need prior knowledge of linguistics or any specific languages, as the contest focuses on pattern recognition and logical reasoning.
The competition consists of two rounds: an open round and an invitational round. The open round is available to all interested high school students in the United States and Canada, and the top-scoring students are invited to participate in the invitational round. The best performers in the invitational round can then represent North America in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), where they compete against teams from around the world.
In NACLO, participants are given a set of problems that involve different languages and scripts. These problems require the use of logical deduction, pattern recognition, and creative thinking to solve puzzles related to language structure, meaning, or translation. In some cases, as in the example above, participants might be asked to decipher the grammar and vocabulary of an unfamiliar language, while in others, they might need to solve a linguistic mystery or analyze a language's properties.
To participate in NACLO, students don't need any specific background or expertise in linguistics, as the problems are designed to be accessible to anyone with a strong sense of curiosity and a knack for problem-solving. If you enjoy puzzles, brain teasers, or simply exploring the intricacies of language, NACLO might be a great fit for you! Keep looking around for more practice problems.