This book presents 56 problems, with solutions, created for high school students competing in a computational linguistics olympiad. “A linguistics olympiad is a puzzle contest ... in which contestants compete to solve self-contained linguistics problem sets. [The olympiads] have their origin in the Moscow Traditional Olympiad in Linguistics, established in 1965, and have since spread around the world” [1]. Zaliznyak, Zhurinsky, and Uspensky were the founding fathers of that Moscow Olympiad [2]; the very first self-contained linguistic problem set was authored by Zaliznyak and published, with detailed solutions, in 1963.

Solving such a self-contained problem does not require any special knowledge or training, but does require articulating some tacit assumptions (that is, linguistic intuition telling us something about the structure of a language) that everyone has by virtue of being a native speaker of some natural language, and also requires being able to abstract out the irrelevant details. In doing so, a linguistic problem solver discovers various interrelated linguistic concepts and patterns of thought. Thus, a good linguistic problem solver ought to be a good analyst. Needless to say, such linguistic problems cannot be adapted for a multiple-choice format.

A self-contained linguistic problem often includes a very small sample from a natural language totally unfamiliar to the solver. The fragments of that language have to be presented in a drastically simplified manner, without grammatical exceptions and without irregularities [3]. A business analyst has to deal with more realistic domains with quite a few exceptions and irregularities, but a good business analyst usually starts with such drastic simplifications.

The problems in the book are authored by dozens of contributors affiliated with institutions such as MIT, Google, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Each problem has been assigned a difficulty score from one to five, but even the five-star problems have been solved by dozens of high school students working under severe time pressure.

The interesting, elegant, and very diverse problems are fun to read and solve, and may be enjoyed not only by high school students, but also by current, future, or potential system thinkers, including programmers, analysts, or linguists. Only a few problems require (near-)native knowledge of English. Detailed solutions with clear explanations (and at times even a little well-presented theory) are provided for many, but not for all, problems. Regretfully, some problems include only answers, so the solution design considerations for these problems remain unclear.

To quote the foreword by James Pustejovsky, the collection of problems presented in the book “is a wonderful general introduction to the field of linguistics through the analytic problem solving technique.” Nevertheless, as Manin observed, it is a long way from isolated puzzles to research programs, “outlines of broad visions” [4]. Various fragments of such research programs have been presented in lectures delivered to high school students, the participants of Moscow Olympiads in Linguistics, during the corresponding Winter and Summer Linguistic Schools (see, for example, [5]). Again regretfully, this book does not include any lectures, nor does it include a reference list.

The book is the first volume of a two-volume set. The second volume was also recently published [6], and earlier problems and solutions presented at the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (the editor of this book is its program chair) are available at http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/index.html.