International Linguistics Olympiad – Sample Problems
ioling.org
ioling.org
You still need to know basic biology, but more often than not, the solution is in the problem. It's more of reading graph, recognizing pattern, and inferring conclusion based on the data provided.
I only reached national level because my lab skill was garbage, but still, fun times.
For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment.
I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg
Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more.
As someone who administered the National Biology Competition in Canada and supported profs in administering the largest first-year biology course in Canada, I can say that there is a LOT of politics behind protecting past tests.
It's just so much labour to have professionals write new tests every year, when writing tests is not what they want to be doing. It comes from the urge to reclaim their time, and build a library instead of going thought the same heavy slog every year
I don't understand why they lock it for international though. AFAIK each year they require every country to provide a couple of questions, and then they will compile it for the exam. Not sure whether they are still doing this.
I felt mostly neutral about biology back in high school (mostly due to the fact that I didn't find it that much to remember, so it was hardly a struggle, but the teaching was less than awe-inspiring to be diplomatic). When I read the piece above, I mostly thought it was well written and matched how school had killed a lot of curiosity for me about many a topic.
Then I recently started reading up on molecular biology basics after stumbling across a bunch of youtube videos, and I have to say I don't think I've ever been this thoroughly, viscerally fascinated by anything I've learned about. Much of what I'd read or studied so far was either "here's a neat model that explains a lot of things concisely", or "here's a way practical problems like x, y, and z can be solved". With the foundational mechanisms of biology, on the other hand, it was like suddenly opening my eyes to incredible levels of complexity all around and inside me I had completely neglected before.
What I'm reading right now is "Molecular Biology of the Cell" — it's a dense textbook and I'm taking my time, so only about two chapters in, but I love how it focuses on a lot of fundamental principles and occasionally points out astonishing facts.
There's also this series which might be a nice, casual primer: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3EED4C1D684D3ADF
James Somers also lists some other books in his post I linked to above, might be worth checking out.
I found the teaching to be way better than any high school class, which is the biology background for most people.
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...
In all the questions there is the implicit assumption that the grammar of a language is based on a set of rules that can be reproduced and reapplied. This is hardly the case with natural languages, which, rather than sets of rules, are more like vast sets of exceptions to very few rules. While tools such as statistical analysis have been succesfully applied to analyzing languages, expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting.
To illustrate with an example, think of a similarly-constructed problem in English. Can you correctly deduce the missing words just by reproducing the patterns below?
ox - oxen / box - ?
mouse - mice / grouse - ?
dish - dishes / fish - ?
Separately, there's also the broader issue that languages are primarily what we speak, to which the writing conventions are secondary. In these examples, we're only looking at how things are written, which is yet another filter that gives an incomplete view.
And you're of course correct that "fishes" exists as a plural form too.
Even if it were, just because "the meaning of something is obvious," it doesn't follow that the words are standard or even well-formed.
Native speakers of any language, and speakers of English likely even more so, generally have the ability to parse through malformed utterances of all sorts and recover most, if not all of the meaning, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy. [1]
Besides, the meaning of many things is obvious even without the ability to comprehend the language. If I kick you in the ass and you start shouting at me in a foreign language I don't understand, I posit that the meaning of it would still be fairly obvious. We can even verify this experimentally if you are so inclined. Count me in for the test, I'd be glad to contribute my part for the advancement of science.
Regardless, any of the above does not invalidate my point that you cannot succesfully construct the standard plural "boxes" from "box" by following the pattern of "oxen" from "ox", and no amount of pedantry and nitpicking can change that.
However, even if you exclude two of the three examples I provided, then the remaining one still stands (and many more can be provided obviously). So I'm not really sure what is it exactly that you're trying to argue here. If it's just that my simple examples did not live up to your expectations, then I concede, and let's move on.
1. https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/
That's literally the linguistics definition of "standard or well-formed", so no.
> So I'm not really sure what is it exactly that you're trying to argue here.
Linguistics is a science, there are mathematical models that natural languages adhere to. Regardless of the social trappings around "standard"/acceptable speech, language really does follow mathematical laws. That's why these puzzles are meaningful and not just diversions for fun.
man -> men, pan -> ?
Same thing with programming Olympiads, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing
Even if the exceptions outnumber the rules, each rule applies in a much larger number of cases, so each case is more likely to follow the rule rather than being an exception.
And linguistics as a field is really about the regularity of languages. When exceptions are studied, it is to discover the underlying rules that e.g. cause exceptions to arise or to disappear.
As a competition, the IOL additionally has the constraint that it should be solvable in a reasonable timeframe, so rather than making people wade through mountains of incomplete and contradictory data, you get carefully selected problems that require less effort to solve.
Perhaps, if you're looking at a language in its entirety, without regard to usage frequency of particular utterances.
However, most of the exceptions tend to be concentrated in the most frequently-used portions of the language. So, while the statement is technically correct, extensive focus on the rules is not really practical.
Take a random verb in English. It's reasonable to assume the third-person singular form can be constructed by appending an "-s" to it. Similarly, the past-tense forms can be constructed with an "-ed." Most verbs are like that.
Yet this rule isn't of much help with the two most common verbs: "to be" (am/are/is/was/were, not bes/beed), and "to have" (has/had, not haves/haved), as well as dozens of others that also happen to be among the most frequently-used.
Thus, from any practical point of view (such as a language learner's), it's best not to expect any rules to hold in principle, at least not until one's awareness of the exceptions is sufficiently advanced.
> And linguistics as a field is really about the regularity of languages. When exceptions are studied, it is to discover the underlying rules that e.g. cause exceptions to arise or to disappear.
I think this is a very good point. I'm not criticizing the questions as they are, as I said I found them interesting. All I'm saying is that it's good to be aware of the limitations of such an approach. It's best to look at some of the problems as logical puzzles, only wrapped in references to some (more or less) obscure languages, and natural languages should not be expected to follow the principles of logic.
Linguistics is the study of languages in a scientific manner. Pattern recognition can be one approach, and it's great when it works to provide insight but it is (or should be) a means to an end and one must also be aware of its limitations.
> The only reason that your list makes sense is because there is such a clear pattern for the vast majority of plural nouns.
This perhaps could be a somewhat valid point if we were only talking about English. However, examples from languages with more complicated conjugation or declension could readily provide much better illustration why any naively-reconstructed rules reproduced from just a couple of hand-picked examples should not be assumed to hold.
So, as I said, while I find those puzzles interesting, I just don't think there's much linguistic insight to it. It's just an exercise in deductive logic. Nothing wrong with it of course, and I concede that might have been the point all along, just call me surprised.
Similarly: "Bob is twice as old as Alice and was 4 when the first man landed on the moon. How old is Alice?" is not a problem in astronomy. It's just a fancy way of stating: "b == 2a && b - ($CURRENT_YEAR - YEAR_OF_FIRST_MOON_LANDING) == 4, solve for a."
"examples from languages with more complicated conjugation or declension could readily provide much better illustration why any naively-reconstructed rules reproduced from just a couple of hand-picked examples should not be assumed to hold": Agreed that you'll need at least one example of each conjugation or declension class. But since there aren't usually more than a few such productive classes, that's not too many examples. There are of course those languages that clearly violate this--there's an African language that seems to have bizarrely many pluralization classes, like hundreds IIRC.
FWIW, languages with agglutinating morphology (long sequences of prefixes and/or suffixes) tend to be more regular than fusional languages (languages where each word takes at most one prefix or suffix, at least from what I've seen.
> Separately, there's also the broader issue that languages are primarily what we speak, to which the writing conventions are secondary. In these examples, we're only looking at how things are written, which is yet another filter that gives an incomplete view.
This is wrong also. If you look carefully at the example questions from the Olympiad, you will see that those languages without a conventional orthography are written using the International Phonetic Alphabet [1], meaning that the texts are a direct transcription of spoken words, with little or no ‘filter’.
[0] https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
Sounds very much like "exceptions" to me then.
>> In these examples, we're only looking at how things are written, which is yet another filter that gives an incomplete view.
> This is wrong also.
Does the linked PDF include any embedded audio material? If not, how could what I wrote be possibly wrong?
> If you look carefully at the example questions from the Olympiad, you will see that those languages without a conventional orthography are written using the International Phonetic Alphabet
I looked carefully at the example questions before posting my original comment already, and I only saw the IPA being used in a single footnote in one place (page 11).
Have we been looking at the same source material?
What I meant by "exceptions" in my previous comment: if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them. I wouldn't expect this statement to even be controversial but since apparently it is, all the more it's worth clarifying.
Is the conjugation of the verb "to be" an exception, or is it covered by a very specific rule that only applies to that particular verb? I guess in the end it could be a matter of definition. But if this is supposed to be one of those "very complex — perhaps even unpredictable, or irregular [rules]," as the grandparent would apparently have it, then I have to question what his definition of an "exception" would be. Are there any exceptions to grammar rules at all?
As a matter of fact I agree with you. In fact, if you look at my original comment, I've been saying something similar all along. Philosophically, what we consider intrinsic rules of nature is often an approximation introduced to gain insight by reducing complexity. However, the discussion was in the context of linguistics, and beyond that I don't see any obvious parallel to the example from natural sciences you're bringing up.
I have co-authored one (the Cubeo language) and edited or typeset lots of others, some of them running into the hundreds of pages. And the reason they're that long has nothing to do with exceptions, it has to do with verbal explanations for the reader, examples, excursions on semantics and pragmatics, citations, discussions of alternative analyses, and so forth. If you boiled it all down to rules--phrase structure rules, say, and morphological rules for languages that enjoy morphology, plus tables of exceptional paradigms (probably the only real exceptions), you'd probably end up with grammars on the order of 20 pages.
And fwiw, I don't think any linguist would consider the paradigm of English "to be" to be even remotely regular.
For the record, the quoted parts were taken from the post I was originally responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467
Also, I definitely agree (quoting from your other post) that:
> The line between spoken and written language isn't really a question of writing. Transcribed speech is still an oral language.
This is a very good point. Perhaps I shouldn't have written so categorically about this in my original comment. I only had in mind that due to the way some of the examples in the PDF are constructed, the focus seems to be more on the writing conventions than on the languages itself.
My point was more that exceptions are rules too. ‘The verb be is conjugated like X, go like Y, and other verbs like Z’ is still a rule, albeit a complicated one, and one which could alternately be rephrased in terms of ‘exceptions’, insofar as that would be at all useful. Truly irregular, unpredictable exceptions — such as are so common in chemistry — are in fact rather rare and restricted in human languages.
Also, while there are often exceptions in morphology, exceptions are almost non-existent in syntax. Again, much depends on where (or whether) there is a distinction between rules and exceptions. In English, unlike some languages, adpositions go before the NP (hence their name, prepositions). But there is at least one English adposition that follows the NP, namely 'ago' (hence it is a postposition). Is this an exception? Depends on your notion of "rule".
Also BTW, the line between spoken and written language isn't really a question of writing, odd as that may seem. Transcribed speech is still an oral language, distinct in many ways from written speech (e.g. written speech, even in newly written languages, tends to be syntactically and often lexically more complex than oral speech in the same language).
General knowledge of language groups may be helpful, but often the problems were for some language used from <1k people. And usully you wouldn't have heard them at all, or would not have additional information where it is spoken.
A linguist can deduce that, because that is written on the sample-problems document.
These field linguists (Imperialistic Europeans, those under the colonial yoke, and disinterested, merely inquisitive parties) produced grammars noting rules, which really do outnumber the exceptions in any given dialect at a given time (that's important), and exceptions. This work has led to everything from a tighter grasp on colonial possessions, to the enhanced ability of colonized to resist their colonizers, to the decipherment of forgotten, thousand year-old and the recording of near-dead languages.
And regarding your last comment, in many cases the languages we're dealing with have no writing, so I do agree. A better Olympiad would have at least included a aural-only portion of the exam. I right there with you on this one.
Really, maybe we're agreeing more than disagreeing, because I also support your comment that "expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting". Mathematics doesn't change; no same person steps in the same linguistic twice. That was the base of the linguistic program for most of the 2nd half of the 20th century (this was also computational linguistics before it took it's rule-based -to-statistical turn), and it produced insights and tools for the field linguists, mainly to decipher morphosyntax. Yet, I'd say the BIG discoveries, like the decipherment of Maya, have come from that muddy, uncomfortable, dangerous field work... gathering evidence for regularities among the glyphs that could be painstakingly comparing those amongst themselves and with the spoken languages of the region today. Some rules have stayed very similar for a long time, and I invite you to look at the historical recreations of proto-languages to get a sense of not only the regularities of a given modern language, but the regularities in the changes of languages over >1000 years.
That being said, (statistics-borne) Computational Linguistics is a wonderful (and a little scary thing), and I'm very willing to change my mind. It certainly challenges the rule-based assumptions and just maybe we're headed towards another paradigm shift.
Sign languages are different--there isn't really an IPA-like system for previously unwritten sign languages.
Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it was peak happiness for teenage me.
I used to take part in this, and informatics olympiad, but I never got anywhere. Even if I never really was good at this, I still miss these things. Now that I'm studying, there are no such things. :|
The other more "serious" programming contests, ACM, Google Code Jam, Top Coder, Codeforces, etc etc -- felt a bit too artificial and too "serious" for my tastes. But if you found competitive programming fun you might like them too.
I had the opposite experience. My school was really into competitions for everything, and it was incredibly demotivating because I didn't care if I was the best at something. Putting effort in for tangible rewards (eg money) is great, but working for a shiny cup or 'glory' is something I've never understood. No one else will care 10 minutes after you've won.
Depends on the competition, but success in federal/national/international competitions is an extremely positive signal during hiring. In my experience (from both sides), at least.
I haven't heard much about similar things being available for adults in other STEM areas unfortunately. Maybe someone else does?
You must be good at SWE interviews.
Oops.
I got so far as picking out the symbols that were clearly morphological in meaning rather than phonological, then realized I couldn't remember the rest of the countries.
I may have a BA in Linguistics, but I also got a D- on geography.
(I think the answers were Argentina and Paraguay but didn’t see where to check.)
Edit: also, maybe this thing is my true calling? I solved a problem like this on my first day of Kindergarten. The teacher wrote something on the board in cursive, in the expectation that the kids would be able to read it. (Parents were polled beforehand to verify none of the kids “knew cursive”.) But since I recognized enough of the letters, and had a “side channel” in terms of what things make sense to say, I could translate it, frustrating the lesson.
Based on the letters I knew, the message looked like this (dashes indicate unknown, pipes are spaces):
W - - c o m - | t o | K - - - - - (lots more)
I first figured that the first word must be “welcome”, and then, given a) the “welcome to” plus giant K word, and given b) that the word “kindergarten” was on my mind so strongly that day, and c) it made sense as the next word, I correctly guessed the solution.
I assumed this skill only had application in crypto and maybe reverse engineering, but hey, I’d it’s what linguists do too, maybe I should consider that!
True, but perhaps high school students should know the nations of the world, at least enough to have memory jogged when given 70% of the letters and some misdirection in word endings.
> (I think the answers were Argentina and Paraguay)
Incorrect.
How would you go on about that? In this case, for example, by taking a look at the sentences. You could count how many times a word appears, and then compare that. And so on.
https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM...
1. figured out that there's probably a decent 1-1 correlation between letters/sounds between the two languaged, intuited this from comparing the characters for peru and uruguay
2. guessed that not all the names translate perfectly. So for instance, what we refer to as "Brazil" may be "Brazilia" or "Brasilia" elsewhere, and that indeed proves to be the case here when comparing the mapped letters for Brazil in Georgian to Brazil in English.
3. not every letter/sound is represented, so I'd have to fill some gaps. Tested this with the first answer: Argentina. The second answer proved harder because the first letter looked similar enough to a P that it threw me off, but after disregarding it, "Columbia" was a good fit for the letters I knew after accounting for alternate spellings of Colombia (Columbia of course being valid for Washington D.C.)
It would make a good interview question to simulate reading a codebase in an unfamiliar language (without mixing the question to also test for problem-solving skills).
Also keep in mind that this is a link only to the sample problems. The actual problems by year had at least Old Indic and Sanskrit poetry: https://ioling.org/problems/by_year
Maybe also others I couldn't see. Also most probably (some/many? of) the national olympiads in linguistics for the participating countries in the IOL had some problems for Indo-Aryan languages at some level (local, regional, national) over the years. On this website we only see the problems for the international competition. I expect that at some point there will be more languages from more language families.
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E...
tl;dr: kara is a glyph which translates as "empty", but the oke comes from subsuming the English word ORCHESTRA - so karaoke is only half Japanese and therefore it is written using the system for foreign words.