An Olympic language

In one of the most recent intense national competitions, this student has come out as best in the world. Aalok Sathe just won a Bronze medal at the 14th International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), which concluded in Mysore this weekend.

The IOL, which is for secondary school students, has been held annually and is one of the 12 International Science Olympiads. Computational thinking, analytical reasoning and logical deduction were the focus of this year’s global competition, co-organised by Microsoft Research to encourage computational thinking and the study of linguistics among students.

Over 170 students representing 30 countries, including India, USA, Japan, Germany and Singapore among others, gathered to test their minds against the world’s toughest puzzles in linguistics.

“I like to study late at night and I’m thankful to the teachers and authorities for allowing me to take out time from school to prepare for the International Olympiad in Linguistics and attend it. I participated in IOL last year, and that helped me. Also, solving more problems enables one to think of different ways in which the next problem presented to you can be. One can better solve problems by building upon the anomalies and strange things you’ve seen before!” shares Aalok of his experience.

So what was the preparation  like? He replies, “We were given a schedule for more than a month of rigorous practice which included solving problems from previous IOLs. We were often sent tests and problems designed by our team leaders and previous participants of IOL. Our team leaders Anshuman and Sesh monitored our practice and gave us individual feedback. We had team challenge sessions each week in which a much harder problem was given, and we solved it in teams of four. An obvious challenge was managing the time between tuition, high school and IOL practice. Coffee was my friend! I prioritised IOL practice over studies and have a lot to catch up on.”

The Linguistics Olympiad is different from other traditional International Science Olympiads. We ask him how and he says, “It is a discipline which is not taught in schools before undergrad, which makes it interesting and challenging. It gives importance to logic.”

He likes football and loves reading, and plans to take up computer science, to pursue cognitive science. “The field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics fascinates me,” he concludes.