Hex is a beautiful game with simple rules and a strategic complexity comparable to that of Chess and Go. The massive game-tree search techniques developed mostly for Chess and successfully used for Checkers and a number of other games, become less useful for games with large branching factors like Hex and Go. In this paper, we describe deduction rules, which are used to calculate values of comp...

As a rst Olympiad to give y ou puzzling pleasure, we give the 18 th

This booklet is a sequel to a similar collection of problems on kinematics. Similarly to that collection the aim here is to present the most important ideas using which one can solve most (> 95%) of olympiad problems on mechanics. Usually a problem is stated first, and is followed by some relevant ideas and suggestions (letter ‘K’ in front of the number of an idea refers to the correspondingly ...

Linguistics olympiads, now offered in more than 20 countries, provide secondary-school students a compelling introduction to an unfamiliar field. The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) includes computational puzzles in addition to purely linguistic ones. This paper explores the computational subject matter we want to convey via NACLO, as well as some of the challenges tha...

Ernest Chiu 10 West Windsor Plainsboro High School Plainsboro, NJ Paolo Gentili 10 Canyon Crest Academy San Diego, CA Courtney Guo 10 International School of Beijing Beijing, China Steven Hao 10 Lynbrook High School San Jose, CA Andrew He 9 Monta Vista High School Cupertino, CA Calvin Huang 10 Henry M Gunn High School Palo Alto, CA Shashwat Kishore 9 Unionville High School Kennett Square, PA La...