Pohar Perme first came in contact with the competition when she was a seventh-grader. "I liked it, because the tasks were always so interesting, each one with a story behind it, for which no prior knowledge was needed. You just need to sit down and think, that's what attracted me the most," explains the mathematician, describing her first experience with the competition.

"What's interesting is that competitions in logical thinking are a completely Slovenian invention. There is no comparable competition, while in Slovenia it's one of the most popular events. It's organized in most schools, even in higher education. And precisely this level proves best that logic is the base of everything, since a student of medicine can be as good of a competitor as someone who studies maths," exemplifies Pohar Perme, to emphasize how universal logic is.

Could Slovenia export the competition? There have been some similar events abroad, but for now this competition remains an endemic Slovenian "species", says Pohar Perme. However, in recent years competitions in logic have started including linguistic challenges as logic problems, following the model of the International Linguistics Olympiad. The competitors now get passages in several languages and their Slovenian translations and need to determine if the language has grammatical cases, how the notion of possession is expressed, how verbs are conjugated ... all by mere deduction.

Not everything is in the end result, however. The competitors always need to substantiate their deductions in a transparent and linguistically meaningful way. "One needs to be able to explain their ideas, merely being smart means nothing on its own," adds Pohar Perme in laughter.

Andrej Čebokli, MMC; translated by K. Z.