This is a photopost of my trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands in August 2026. I traveled to attend a summer school on Quantum Algorithms and Quantum Error Correction at the University of Amsterdam.

A windmill but not really.

Clouds over a river.

Trillions of bikes. The whole city gives university campus vibes.

Canal.

Another canal.

Downtown street.

Mini-castle in the city center.

A funny thing happened while I was walking around Amsterdam. I had taken photos along a path from my hostel to the city center. And my phone battery was running low. So while returning I couldn’t run WiFi or look at Google Maps and had to rely on glancing at the photos for a few seconds. But the photos were taken from a perspective of the other side of the street. This motivated a combinatorial problem : “The Amsterdam Walk Problem”, you are at a point on an undirected graph, and you want to reach your home. You can cross an edge, and find out only after crossing it whether you took that path earlier. Can you minimize the expected/worst case time to reach home? Does your initial journey need to be cycle-free? Can a similar problem be defined for the quantum random walk case?

I made it back fortunately. This cozy pub is just by the university. I had ratatouille!