Infinite Communication Complexity

Suppose that Alice and Bob are given each an infinite string, and they want to decide whether their two strings are in a given relation. How much communication do they need? How can communication be even defined and measured for infinite strings? In this article, we propose a formalism for a notion of infinite communication complexity, prove that it satisfies some natural properties and coincides, for relevant applications, with the classical notion of amortized communication complexity. More-over, an application is given for tackling some conjecture about tilings and multidimensional sofic shifts.Comment: First Version. Written from the Computer Science PO

Experimental quantum communication complexity

We prove that the fidelity of two exemplary communication complexity protocols, allowing for an N-1 bit communication, can be exponentially improved by N-1 (unentangled) qubit communication. Taking into account, for a fair comparison, all inefficiencies of state-of-the-art set-up, the experimental implementation outperforms the best classical protocol, making it the candidate for multi-party quantum communication applications.Comment: 4 pages, 2 eps figures, RevTEX4; submitted June 23, 200

Is Communication Complexity Physical?

Recently, Brassard et. al. conjectured that the fact that the maximal possible correlations between two non-local parties are the quantum-mechanical ones is linked to a reasonable restriction on communication complexity. We provide further support for the conjecture in the multipartite case. We show that any multipartite communication complexity problem could be reduced to triviality, had Nature been more non-local than quantum-mechanics by a quite small gap for any number of parties. Intriguingly, the multipartite nonlocal-box that we use to show the result corresponds to the generalized Bell inequality that manifests maximal violation in respect to a local hidden-variable theory

Communication Complexity of Cake Cutting

We study classic cake-cutting problems, but in discrete models rather than using infinite-precision real values, specifically, focusing on their communication complexity. Using general discrete simulations of classical infinite-precision protocols (Robertson-Webb and moving-knife), we roughly partition the various fair-allocation problems into 3 classes: "easy" (constant number of rounds of logarithmic many bits), "medium" (poly-logarithmic total communication), and "hard". Our main technical result concerns two of the "medium" problems (perfect allocation for 2 players and equitable allocation for any number of players) which we prove are not in the "easy" class. Our main open problem is to separate the "hard" from the "medium" classes.Comment: Added efficient communication protocol for the monotone crossing proble

Quantum Weakly Nondeterministic Communication Complexity

We study the weakest model of quantum nondeterminism in which a classical proof has to be checked with probability one by a quantum protocol. We show the first separation between classical nondeterministic communication complexity and this model of quantum nondeterministic communication complexity for a total function. This separation is quadratic.Comment: 12 pages. v3: minor correction

Non-locality and Communication Complexity

Quantum information processing is the emerging field that defines and realizes computing devices that make use of quantum mechanical principles, like the superposition principle, entanglement, and interference. In this review we study the information counterpart of computing. The abstract form of the distributed computing setting is called communication complexity. It studies the amount of information, in terms of bits or in our case qubits, that two spatially separated computing devices need to exchange in order to perform some computational task. Surprisingly, quantum mechanics can be used to obtain dramatic advantages for such tasks. We review the area of quantum communication complexity, and show how it connects the foundational physics questions regarding non-locality with those of communication complexity studied in theoretical computer science. The first examples exhibiting the advantage of the use of qubits in distributed information-processing tasks were based on non-locality tests. However, by now the field has produced strong and interesting quantum protocols and algorithms of its own that demonstrate that entanglement, although it cannot be used to replace communication, can be used to reduce the communication exponentially. In turn, these new advances yield a new outlook on the foundations of physics, and could even yield new proposals for experiments that test the foundations of physics.Comment: Survey paper, 63 pages LaTeX. A reformatted version will appear in Reviews of Modern Physic

Quantum Entanglement and Communication Complexity

We consider a variation of the multi-party communication complexity scenario where the parties are supplied with an extra resource: particles in an entangled quantum state. We show that, although a prior quantum entanglement cannot be used to simulate a communication channel, it can reduce the communication complexity of functions in some cases. Specifically, we show that, for a particular function among three parties (each of which possesses part of the function's input), a prior quantum entanglement enables them to learn the value of the function with only three bits of communication occurring among the parties, whereas, without quantum entanglement, four bits of communication are necessary. We also show that, for a particular two-party probabilistic communication complexity problem, quantum entanglement results in less communication than is required with only classical random correlations (instead of quantum entanglement). These results are a noteworthy contrast to the well-known fact that quantum entanglement cannot be used to actually simulate communication among remote parties.Comment: 10 pages, latex, no figure