TY - JOUR T1 - Classical lower bounds from quantum upper bounds Y1 - 2018 A1 - Shalev Ben-David A1 - Adam Bouland A1 - Ankit Garg A1 - Robin Kothari AB -

We prove lower bounds on complexity measures, such as the approximate degree of a Boolean function and the approximate rank of a Boolean matrix, using quantum arguments. We prove these lower bounds using a quantum query algorithm for the combinatorial group testing problem. 
We show that for any function f, the approximate degree of computing the OR of n copies of f is Omega(sqrt{n}) times the approximate degree of f, which is optimal. No such general result was known prior to our work, and even the lower bound for the OR of ANDs function was only resolved in 2013. 
We then prove an analogous result in communication complexity, showing that the logarithm of the approximate rank (or more precisely, the approximate gamma_2 norm) of F: X x Y -> {0,1} grows by a factor of Omega~(sqrt{n}) when we take the OR of n copies of F, which is also essentially optimal. As a corollary, we give a new proof of Razborov's celebrated Omega(sqrt{n}) lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of the disjointness problem. 
Finally, we generalize both these results from composition with the OR function to composition with arbitrary symmetric functions, yielding nearly optimal lower bounds in this setting as well.

UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06256 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Quantum Supremacy and the Complexity of Random Circuit Sampling Y1 - 2018 A1 - Adam Bouland A1 - Bill Fefferman A1 - Chinmay Nirkhe A1 - Umesh Vazirani AB -

A critical milestone on the path to useful quantum computers is quantum supremacy - a demonstration of a quantum computation that is prohibitively hard for classical computers. A leading near-term candidate, put forth by the Google/UCSB team, is sampling from the probability distributions of randomly chosen quantum circuits, which we call Random Circuit Sampling (RCS). In this paper we study both the hardness and verification of RCS. While RCS was defined with experimental realization in mind, we show complexity theoretic evidence of hardness that is on par with the strongest theoretical proposals for supremacy. Specifically, we show that RCS satisfies an average-case hardness condition - computing output probabilities of typical quantum circuits is as hard as computing them in the worst-case, and therefore #P-hard. Our reduction exploits the polynomial structure in the output amplitudes of random quantum circuits, enabled by the Feynman path integral. In addition, it follows from known results that RCS satisfies an anti-concentration property, making it the first supremacy proposal with both average-case hardness and anti-concentration. 

UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04402 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Grover search and the no-signaling principle JF - Physical Review Letters Y1 - 2016 A1 - Ning Bao A1 - Adam Bouland A1 - Stephen P. Jordan AB -

From an information processing point of view, two of the key properties of quantum physics are the no-signaling principle and the Grover search lower bound. That is, despite admitting stronger-than-classical correlations, quantum mechanics does not imply superluminal signaling, and despite a form of exponential parallelism, quantum mechanics does not imply polynomial-time brute force solution of NP-complete problems. Here, we investigate the degree to which these two properties are connected. We examine four classes of deviations from quantum mechanics, for which we draw inspiration from the literature on the black hole information paradox: nonunitary dynamics, non-Born-rule measurement, cloning, and postselection. We find that each model admits superluminal signaling if and only if it admits a query complexity speedup over Grover's algorithm. Furthermore, we show that the physical resources required to send a superluminal signal scale polynomially with the resources needed to speed up Grover's algorithm. Hence, one can perform a physically reasonable experiment demonstrating superluminal signaling if and only if one can perform a reasonable experiment inducing a speedup over Grover's algorithm.

VL - 117 U4 - 120501 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00657 ER -