Bet you can't solve this puzzle

Any chess players out there?

Last year Marijn Willem Otte, then a student at SAIS Bologna, responded to a call from our Admissions Office for photos, magnets and mementos with a chess problem, pictured here.

The problem has remained on our bulletin board, and no one has yet solved the problem. Marijn put the solution to the problem in an envelope, which has remained sealed ever since.

Here's the challenge: A game begins with 1.e4 and ends in the fifth move with knight takes rook mate.

"With only five moves deep, the solution is simple, elegant and stunning," Marijn said. "Some of the greatest chess minds of the century could not solve it, yet there have been cases of amateurs solving it overnight."

For some amusing anecdotes about the puzzle, including one about a stumped Garry Kasparov, click here.

Marijn, who is studying at SAIS DC this year, has a distinguished record in chess. He is a FIDE Master with two international master performances; he participated twice in the world university student chess championship.

Think you have the answer? Send it to admissions@jhubc.it and if you're the first, you win a SAIS Bologna tee shirt.

Nelson Graves

And here's the winner of our photo contest

She runs marathons and speaks Mandarin. She graduated from Skidmore College magna cum laude with honors. She practices Krav Maga.

Meet the winner of our photo contest: Megan Rhodes.

Here is the picture that drew the most votes:

A picture might be worth a thousand words but it rarely tells the whole story. The photo captures Megan, an MIPP candidate at SAIS Bologna this year, running a half marathon on, yes, the Great Wall of China. She finished top of her age group and was the first American across the line.

"The race was mostly run in a surrounding village, replete with adorable children giving you high fives and giddily chirping 'Hello!' in English," she said. "There was a small goat path, and we formed a single line to use a rope to get off the wall."

Megan ran the Beijing marathon in 2010 and has also run the 42.2-km race in San Diego and New Hampshire. To train for the Beijing run, because of heavy air pollution Megan trained mostly on a treadmill, including a 3-1/2 hour run on the machine. Ouch.

Never one to shun a challenge, here is Megan bungee jumping at the Long Qing gorges outside Beijing, where she lived for 5 years before coming to Bologna last month:

What is Megan's mystery prize? A free lunch with Amina and me in a Bologna restaurant. (Please don't say second prize is two free lunches with us.)

The contest involved photographs by incoming students that were included in this slideshow.

Here are the runners-up, all students at SAIS Bologna this year:

by David Gorgani

by Leslie Yun

by Marwa Abdou