[HN Gopher] International Linguistics Olympiad - Sample Problems
___________________________________________________________________
International Linguistics Olympiad - Sample Problems
Author : Claude_Shannon
Score : 263 points
Date : 2022-01-21 09:51 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ioling.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ioling.org)
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| What are they? For major part, they are interesting puzzles.
| Let's take the second part for example. You have some sentences
| in Ancient Greek, and you have translations in English. Your goal
| is to find which translation is for what sentence.
|
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It's not hard, but some passing knowledge of the languages
| definitely helps (like the Aragonese table is almost trivial
| for people who know a Romance language), but especially how
| linguistic transformations happen
| yccs27 wrote:
| Definitely. OTOH, the Japanese braille question was more of a
| pattern recognition puzzle.
| q3k wrote:
| Some surface-level knowledge about Japanese writing systems
| (ie. the fact that Katakana/Hiragana are fairly regular
| consonant+vowel syllabries) helps a lot.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The critical part is knowing that haiku is ha-i-ku, not
| hai-ku.
| yccs27 wrote:
| It seems like you can solve most of them just as a puzzle, but
| some linguistic knowledge and intuition would definitely help.
| I like the concept.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Yeah. Someone else in the thread said they were more like
| computational puzzles, which I kind of agree with - they're a
| lot of just logic - but some background knowledge of
| etymology is also helpful. For the first puzzle, if you
| didn't know Brazil might be translated as something like
| "brazilia", then you would have struggled.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| Yes! They can be solved as a puzzle, but should you happen to
| know some linguistic concepts or be familiar with, out of
| lack of better words, lesser-known languages like Navajo,
| Armenian or so on, it helps too.
| 4cao wrote:
| The puzzles are interesting but I'm not sure how much they
| overlap with the field of linguistics in general. They seem
| better described as problems in computational linguistics.
|
| 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.
| chana_masala wrote:
| This person linguists!
| mcswell wrote:
| You can't verb just any noun.
| bradrn wrote:
| I disagree. Field linguistics is _all about_ deducing the
| underlying rules of a language from a language sample. Maybe
| those rules are very complex -- perhaps even unpredictable, or
| irregular -- but they can be described. The best reference
| grammars can be thousands of pages long in an attempt to
| describe all these rules (I always recommend [0] as a
| particularly good, open-access example). Based on the samples,
| the Linguistics Olympiad presents exactly the same sorts of
| problems, just in a reduced form.
|
| > 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...
| 4cao wrote:
| > Maybe those rules are very complex -- perhaps even
| unpredictable, or irregular -- but they can be described.
|
| 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?
|
| https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf
| xmprt wrote:
| A lot of Chemistry and Biology is full of exceptions (some
| might even say that exceptions are the only rule in
| chemistry) however people seem to have no qualms with
| trying to reason through those subjects.
| 4cao wrote:
| > A lot of Chemistry and Biology is full of exceptions
| (some might even say that exceptions are the only rule in
| chemistry)
|
| 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.
| mcswell wrote:
| "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've never seen a grammar book that
| was thousands of pages long, and I've looked at lots of
| them. The longest ones I know (for English, naturally)
| are still well under 1000 pages.
|
| 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.
| 4cao wrote:
| Thank you for your comments, it's been a pleasure to read
| all of them.
|
| 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.
| mcswell wrote:
| By and large, languages have rules, and exceptions are--
| well, the exception. Exceptions tend to occur more often in
| common words (perhaps because children don't learn the
| exceptions in rare words, unless they're drilled on them--
| which we do on English in school). One question though is
| where the boundary is between rule and exception. In
| Spanish, various subsets of verbs undergo stem allomorphy.
| This can generally be described as rules (you do have to
| know which words undergo those rules), but it's unclear
| where the rules stop being rules and start being
| exceptions.
|
| 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).
| enkid wrote:
| Have you learned a new language? It's basically an exercise in
| memorizing vocabulary and phrases and pattern recognition.
| Linguistics is the study of those patterns across different
| languages. Therefore, I don't think there is anything wrong
| with problems focused on pattern recognition. I also think you
| are overstating the amount languages break their own rules. The
| only reason that your list makes sense is because there is such
| a clear pattern for the vast majority of plural nouns.
| 4cao wrote:
| > Linguistics is the study of those patterns across different
| languages.
|
| 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."
| mcswell wrote:
| "Linguistics is the study of those patterns across
| different languages." vs. "Linguistics is the study of
| languages in a scientific manner." I take the first answer
| to be a bit different: I don't think the emphasis is on
| "patterns", rather it's saying that linguistics is about
| looking for ways that all languages are similar (like the
| claim that they can all be described by a context free
| grammar, or that apart from full word reduplication, the
| morphology of all languages is finite state). The
| alternative--your answer--is valid, although linguists of
| the first sort (I'm thinking of many generative linguists)
| look down their noses at it.
|
| "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.
| fourtrees wrote:
| Discovering these rules and their exceptions have been what
| field linguists, and philologists before them like Champollion
| (who should be more widely known imo -- he was actually doing
| science to decipher hieroglyphics; a generation or two before,
| decipherments were largely alchemistic gobbledygook) as well
| and the westerners and Indians who worked on the old languages
| India had been doing for well over a hundred years.
|
| 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.
| mcswell wrote:
| "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." Why? A previously
| unwritten spoken language can always be written with IPA, and
| giving the test orally would really be a test of people's
| recognition of sounds they may not have been exposed to even
| in their phonetics class.
|
| Sign languages are different--there isn't really an IPA-like
| system for previously unwritten sign languages.
| mcphage wrote:
| These are also selected problems, and they start with easy
| problems. Those are pulled from very regular parts of
| languages. If you have a part of a language with no pattern to
| it, then nobody is going to make it a problem. But it's good
| practice, especially as the problems get harder, for finding
| regularity where it's difficult to discern.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > They seem better described as problems in computational
| linguistics.
|
| A linguist can deduce that, because that is written on the
| sample-problems document.
| [deleted]
| lalaithion wrote:
| The puzzles look to me like some of the homework problems I had
| in my Syntax & Morphology class, so while they don't cover all
| of linguistics, they certainly cover an interesting subset.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Both "boxen" and "fishes" are very well attested in real
| English usage.
| 4cao wrote:
| The noun "boxen" is only used as a joke ("Unix boxen"), which
| is precisely why I thought it would make a cromulent example.
|
| And you're of course correct that "fishes" exists as a plural
| form too.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| It's part of a strange sociolect, but that doesn't
| invalidate that it's well attested enough so that the
| meaning is obvious to any English speaker.
| 4cao wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's really well-understood beyond
| specific social circles. You would have to substantiate
| this claim.
|
| 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/
| chana_masala wrote:
| What's your point though? The OP was demonstrating that
| constructing plurals based on the given pattern does not
| hold generally. If you're stuck on boxen, then choose
| some others:
|
| man -> men, pan -> ?
| 4cao wrote:
| Great example, much better than anything I came up with.
| dahak27 wrote:
| In a way that proves the point as well though - not only are
| there inconsistent rules there are also seemingly under-
| determined rules where you can use one of many options (but
| only sometimes!)
| yorwba wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| 4cao wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| yccs27 wrote:
| Indeed, in mathematics/physics the analytically unsolvable
| problems also vastly outnumber the tractable ones, yet in a
| competition you always get questions with nice solutions.
| zhan_eg wrote:
| Based on discussions with friends who have been medalists from
| International Olympiads more than once, there is no need of any
| real linguistic knowledge.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Keep in mind that English, as a _lingua franca_ , is one of the
| most heavily exceptioned languages in the world.
| usrnm wrote:
| > The puzzles are interesting but I'm not sure how much they
| overlap with the field of linguistics in general
|
| Same thing with programming Olympiads, but it isn't necessarily
| a bad thing
| Mezzie wrote:
| I find it hilarious that when I downloaded the first set, I was
| immediately defeated by the first problem. Not because of the
| linguistics, but because I cannot for the life of me remember the
| other countries in South America.
|
| Oops.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I tried to solve it and came up with (linked to avoid
| spoilers): https://dpaste.com/AR8NGYWTE Did others arrive to
| the same?
| sneak wrote:
| The solutions are linked below the quiz.
| SilasX wrote:
| Right, it claimed you didn't need background knowledge, but
| then on that problem you'd need to know the South American
| countries. They probably should have given you a list of them
| as an aid there.
|
| (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!
| mcswell wrote:
| Also useful in understanding ancient manuscripts that have
| been partly eaten by termites, or where part of the rock has
| deteriorated; or palimpsests. In short, you should become a
| professor of medieval literature, like the good Dr. Henry
| Jones, Sr.
| gowld wrote:
| > you'd need to know the South American countries
|
| 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.
| pastage wrote:
| Is it not enough to see patterns in the names, there is only
| like five letters missing, they have some nifty problem solving
| ideas in linguistics. I solved the barcode EAN - 13 translation
| they had in 2011 thatI spent what felt like two hours and my
| linguist friend just followed an generic algorithm.
|
| https://ioling.org/booklets/iol-2011-indiv-prob.en-us.pdf
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yup. I did a Linguistics degree, so this was a great blast
| from the past.
|
| 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.
| qsort wrote:
| A nerd snipe if there ever was one.
| [deleted]
| bhussai20 wrote:
| In the deepest parts of my heart, I wish there was a programming
| language version of this.
|
| 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).
| karimf wrote:
| Whenever I tell someone I was competing for International Biology
| Olympiad, they were always saying, "Uh I hate biology, it is just
| memorizing names." Yes, biology exam in school is just
| memorizing, but it's a totally different beast for the
| international competition.
|
| 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.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| May I ask, can you say something more? I'm interested in how
| that would have looked like.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| karimf wrote:
| After reading the problems again, well, I might have to take
| my words back. When I said basic biology, it's not high-
| school biology, but college-level biology. There are five
| main topics: molecular cell biology, anatomy and physiology
| of animals, anatomy and physiology of plants, genetics, and
| ecology. If you want to get a medal in the international
| competition, then, you probably need to read the text book
| material for each topic to get the basic concepts.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html
| patcon wrote:
| > I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a
| password
|
| 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
| saagarjha wrote:
| I did math and physics competitively and all the exams
| are very easy to access online, which meant that
| questions were generally "new" each time. It's
| interesting to see this not be the case...I honestly
| can't understand how this would reasonably work, because
| the people who were good literally kept copies of all the
| problems that they did, so a cottage industry of past
| tests would inevitably exist anyways.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| The thing that would happen then is private cram schools
| will make their students recover the past test questions
| from memory, and build up a huge database of questions
| that only their students have access to. This is how
| things went in South Korea, and probably explains a part
| of why they always win so many gold medals.
| karimf wrote:
| Oh wow. I also used to be in the committee for the
| National Biology Competition in my country. And yes, it's
| very hard to make a high quality question, so sometimes
| we reuse or reskin old problems. A student who has access
| to past exams archive have significant advantage.
|
| 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.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I find it interesting - for me, the existence of an olympiad
| for a subject is a kind of immediate proof that there's plenty
| of room for a particular kind of problem-solving in it (which
| you don't necessarily get ready-to-hand in all fields of
| knowledge/research).
| bschne wrote:
| That reminds me (tangentially) of this piece I read a while
| back: https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
|
| 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.
| qwertygnu wrote:
| Any resources that you find particularly great?
| bschne wrote:
| What got me started was probably this from "The Thought
| Emporium", and other videos on his channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3FcbFqSoQY (obvious don't
| try this at home disclaimer).
|
| 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.
| kens wrote:
| I second the recommendation for "Molecular Biology of the
| Cell" if you want to know how cells work, which is a
| pretty interesting and important subject. One thing I
| like about this book is that it's clear about what we
| don't know, and there is a lot. (It's interesting to read
| books from before a discovery (e.g. geology books before
| continental drift) and see if they acknowledge something
| is unknown or if they confidently give the wrong answer.)
| imranq wrote:
| Checkout the MIT class: Biology Secret of Life by Eric
| Lander, who is a mathematician turned geneticist who led the
| Human Genome Project. He teaches in an axiomatic way, which I
| think many here would appreciate.
|
| 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...
| bschne wrote:
| Wow, I need to check that out, thanks!
| eganist wrote:
| tackled the georgian translation question during my lunch break.
| My approach (spoilers):
|
| 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.)
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| What are the other 12 Olympiads? I'm only aware of Biology, Math,
| Informatics, physics, Chemistry, and now Linguistics (which I
| wasn't aware was a category in 2003).
| karimf wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad
| mFixman wrote:
| The part I miss the most from high school were these kinds of
| competitions.
|
| Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it was
| peak happiness for teenage me.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| > Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it
| was peak happiness for teenage me.
|
| You must be good at SWE interviews.
| mFixman wrote:
| I wish! At least I enjoy studying for them.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it
| was peak happiness for teenage me._
|
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Avamander wrote:
| At least in IT there are challenge platforms and hackatons, in
| cybersecurity there are CTF's, training sites and bug bounty
| programs. So at least in those aspects there's a possibility to
| learn new things.
|
| I haven't heard much about similar things being available for
| adults in other STEM areas unfortunately. Maybe someone else
| does?
| zodiac wrote:
| You can still do IOI style contests very regularly as an adult,
| check out AtCoder or codeforces. Actually the US national
| olympiad (USACO) is open for everyone too :)
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| That hits so close. :(
|
| 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. :|
| amelius wrote:
| There's the ACM competition for teams.
|
| https://icpc.global/
| qumpis wrote:
| And all kinds of competitive programming events, such as
| Codeforces.
| [deleted]
| nothis wrote:
| My browser threw a hissy fit, if you just want to download the
| PDF with the sample problems, this is the link:
|
| https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM...
| nikanj wrote:
| Your link is also broken
| pkage wrote:
| This should work: https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf
| melenaboija wrote:
| Broken
| notRobot wrote:
| Works for me.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Well, this at least made me finally look up the reason why
| KARAOKE (a Japanese word) is written in Japanese using Katakana
| (glyphs almost exclusively reserved for the vast number of
| foreign [mostly English] words Japanese has subsumed):
|
| 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.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| It does seem like actually knowing the target language is a
| major (unfair?) advantage - I couldn't make sense of any of
| these _except_ for that one, because I can read Japanese, and
| that made it trivial.
| [deleted]
| lofatdairy wrote:
| Anyone else find it funny to see toki pona under "hard problems".
| It's certainly a tough language to translate because it's
| interpretative and vague, but there's a certain irony in a
| language that's intended to be easy to learn finding itself
| there.
| enkid wrote:
| If you like these types of puzzles, I'd suggest getting The
| Language Lover's Puzzle Book, which is a very accessible curated
| collection of ILO problems.
| hdesh wrote:
| What's the criterion for choosing a language for the competition?
| I took a cursory glance and could not find any Indian language,
| which is unfortunate given the huge linguistic diversity in
| India.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| Fave intern had a linguistics background, and had a new puzzle to
| post every lunchtime. I thought it was just her, but I guess
| puzzles are big in the 'ling' world
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| I had them in my high school equivalent in Poland. We were
| encouraged to take a part in it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-21 23:01 UTC)