The math department hosted the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) competition in Feldman-Horn Gallery on Jan. 23. Every year, over 1500 students from high schools all across the U.S. compete in the event, yet it was the first time the school hosted an event for its students.
The top-performing participants in the initial round will advance to the invitational round, bringing them one step closer to representing the U.S. in the International Linguistics Olympiad. Students Jacob Massey ’25 and Angela Yuan ’26 participated in the three-hour event, which featured eight linguistics puzzles designed to test pattern recognition and logical reasoning skills. Their results will be posted by the end of February.
Yuan said she was particularly captivated by NACLO’s unique combination of linguistics and problem-solving.
“I’ve always been fascinated by languages and puzzles, so NACLO felt like the perfect combination of both,” Yuan said. “When I first learned about the competition, I was drawn to the idea of using logical reasoning to decode linguistic patterns, even in languages I’d never encountered before.” Massey said the competition stood out among his academic experiences at the school.
“Out of all the competitions and tests that I’ve participated in at Harvard-Westlake, NACLO was by far the most fun” Massey said.“Each question was a puzzle unlike any other I’d ever seen before. It was all I could think about for the rest of the day.”
Yuan said the wide variety of the NACLO puzzles kept her engaged and encouraged other puzzle enthusiasts to participate next year.
“Some problems had more intuitive patterns that were fun to crack, while others required deeper analysis and careful attention to detail,” Yuan said. “I encourage anyone who enjoys logic puzzles, languages or problem-solving to try NACLO next year.”
Math Teacher Andy Stout said based the positive response from this year’s participants, he intends to expand future outreach for the event.
“Now that I know about it, I plan on promoting it more when we do it again next year,” Stout said.
