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Sri Lanka's route to the International Olympiad in Linguistics starts here.

Sri Lanka
Logic Olympiad

About

About the olympiad

A national competition that tests how you think, not what you have been taught.

What the Sri Lanka Logic Olympiad is

The Sri Lanka Logic Olympiad is a national competition in logical reasoning and problem solving, open free of charge to every school student in the country. It is held in Sinhala, English and Tamil.

The competition has two rounds: an online round taken across the whole country on 5 December 2026, and an onsite final in Colombo in late January 2027. It serves as the national selection for the International Olympiad in Linguistics, where Sri Lanka will compete for the first time at IOL 2027 in Bangkok.

Why logic

Sri Lankan students are measured constantly, but almost always on material they were supposed to have covered. That rewards preparation and access as much as ability, and it quietly filters out talented students whose schools could not offer the subject.

A logic olympiad removes that filter. Every problem is self-contained: the data you need is on the page, and the task is to find the pattern in it. A student who has never heard the word 'olympiad' can sit down and start solving. What is being measured is patience, precision and the willingness to test an idea and abandon it when it fails.

The International Olympiad in Linguistics

The International Olympiad in Linguistics is one of the twelve recognised International Science Olympiads. Contestants are given problems in languages they have never encountered, sometimes with only a dozen example sentences, and must reconstruct the grammar well enough to translate new material. No knowledge of any particular language is assumed or helps.

It is, in practice, a reasoning competition, which is why our national selection is a logic competition. Contestants who qualify for the training programme are taught the specific problem types they will meet internationally; nobody is expected to arrive already knowing them.

Sri Lanka will send its first team to IOL 2027 in Bangkok.

About IFSET

The Institute for Science, Engineering and Technology is a Sri Lankan non-profit founded in 2020 that finds and trains students for international academic competition. It runs the national olympiads in economics and finance and in artificial intelligence, and its contestants have brought home ten international medals.

IFSET runs every competition free of charge and selects purely on performance. The Logic Olympiad is its third national olympiad.

About

What we hold to

01

Free, always

No entry fee, no training fee, no cost to a school for taking part. The final and the training programme that follows it are free as well.

02

Merit only

Papers are marked against a published scheme. Selection follows the marks. Nothing else is considered.

03

Equal in three languages

Sinhala, Tamil and English papers are prepared together and reviewed by native speakers so that no contestant is advantaged or held back by their language.

04

Open about how it works

Problems and solutions are published after each round, along with the mark distribution and the cut-off for the next stage.