Forget the Winter Olympics. What about the logic Olympics?

High school kids with a particular talent for interpreting languages and logic - from Mayan Hieroglyphs to Japanese braille, from language games to grammatical problems in endangered languages - can now compete internationally in their very own Olympics.

OzCLO (Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad) is a competition for teams of high school students who can solve problems which challenge skills in reasoning and language. This year's winners will compete at the International Olympiad in Sweden.

The University of Sydney's Linguistics Department (School for Letters, Arts and Media) is sponsoring the NSW (Southern region) OzCLO competition, and the first round of 'logic-offs' is to be held on 24th February at Sydney University as part of `O Week', with almost 100 students from 11 schools participating.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other students will be competing in state rounds in WA, the ACT, SA, Victoria, Queensland and New England. The national round is set for 24th March.

High school students don't typically know what linguistics and computational linguistics are, but the OzCLO competition provides students who like languages, maths, computers, and natural sciences to discover new fields of study.

OzCLO was first held in 2008, with the three winning teams from the First Round in NSW and VIC competing in the National Round to solve problems in Icelandic agreement, Finite State Automata, Mayan hieroglyphs, Manam Pile directionals and spectrograms of English. Competitors ranged from year 9 to year 12, and came from both state and private schools.

The competition was such a huge success that in 2009, OzCLO grew to be an almost Australia-wide event, with more than 330 high school students taking part in the First Round in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, West Australia and the ACT. An Australian team then went to Poland to compete for the first time in the International Linguistics Olympiads.

The main organiser of the event, coach to the Australian team in Poland last year and Honorary Associate of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Dominique Estival, is available for interview.

Teachers who have been involved in the competition from North Sydney Girls High, Macarthur Anglican School in Camden, Meriden Anglican Girls School in Strathfield and Smiths Hill High School in Wollongong are also available for intervi


Source: The University Of Sydney http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=4518