An Application of Quantum Finite Automata to Interactive Proof Systems

Quantum finite automata have been studied intensively since their introduction in late 1990s as a natural model of a quantum computer with finite-dimensional quantum memory space. This paper seeks their direct application to interactive proof systems in which a mighty quantum prover communicates with a quantum-automaton verifier through a common communication cell. Our quantum interactive proof systems are juxtaposed to Dwork-Stockmeyer's classical interactive proof systems whose verifiers are two-way probabilistic automata. We demonstrate strengths and weaknesses of our systems and further study how various restrictions on the behaviors of quantum-automaton verifiers affect the power of quantum interactive proof systems.Comment: This is an extended version of the conference paper in the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Kingston, Canada, July 22-24, 200

Entanglement-Resistant Two-Prover Interactive Proof Systems and Non-Adaptive Private Information Retrieval Systems

We show that, for any language in NP, there is an entanglement-resistant constant-bit two-prover interactive proof system with a constant completeness vs. soundness gap. The previously proposed classical two-prover constant-bit interactive proof systems are known not to be entanglement-resistant. This is currently the strongest expressive power of any known constant-bit answer multi-prover interactive proof system that achieves a constant gap. Our result is based on an "oracularizing" property of certain private information retrieval systems, which may be of independent interest.Comment: 8 page

Quantum Multi-Prover Interactive Proof Systems with Limited Prior Entanglement

This paper gives the first formal treatment of a quantum analogue of multi-prover interactive proof systems. It is proved that the class of languages having quantum multi-prover interactive proof systems is necessarily contained in NEXP, under the assumption that provers are allowed to share at most polynomially many prior-entangled qubits. This implies that, in particular, if provers do not share any prior entanglement with each other, the class of languages having quantum multi-prover interactive proof systems is equal to NEXP. Related to these, it is shown that, in the case a prover does not have his private qubits, the class of languages having quantum single-prover interactive proof systems is also equal to NEXP.Comment: LaTeX2e, 19 pages, 2 figures, title changed, some of the sections are fully revised, journal version in Journal of Computer and System Science

Quantum Proofs

Quantum information and computation provide a fascinating twist on the notion of proofs in computational complexity theory. For instance, one may consider a quantum computational analogue of the complexity class \class{NP}, known as QMA, in which a quantum state plays the role of a proof (also called a certificate or witness), and is checked by a polynomial-time quantum computation. For some problems, the fact that a quantum proof state could be a superposition over exponentially many classical states appears to offer computational advantages over classical proof strings. In the interactive proof system setting, one may consider a verifier and one or more provers that exchange and process quantum information rather than classical information during an interaction for a given input string, giving rise to quantum complexity classes such as QIP, QSZK, and QMIP* that represent natural quantum analogues of IP, SZK, and MIP. While quantum interactive proof systems inherit some properties from their classical counterparts, they also possess distinct and uniquely quantum features that lead to an interesting landscape of complexity classes based on variants of this model. In this survey we provide an overview of many of the known results concerning quantum proofs, computational models based on this concept, and properties of the complexity classes they define. In particular, we discuss non-interactive proofs and the complexity class QMA, single-prover quantum interactive proof systems and the complexity class QIP, statistical zero-knowledge quantum interactive proof systems and the complexity class \class{QSZK}, and multiprover interactive proof systems and the complexity classes QMIP, QMIP*, and MIP*.Comment: Survey published by NOW publisher

Interactive Proof Systems

The report is a compilation of lecture notes that were prepared during the course ``Interactive Proof Systems'' given by the authors at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. These notes were also used for a short course ``Interactive Proof Systems'' given by the second author at MPI, Saarbruecken. The objective of the course was to study the recent developments in complexity theory about interactive proof systems, which led to some surprising consequences on nonapproximability of NP hard problems. We start the course with an introduction to complexity theory and covered some classical results related with circuit complexity, randomizations and counting classes, notions which are either part of the definitions of interactive proof systems or are used in proving the above results. We define arthur merlin games and interactive proof systems, which are equivalent formulations of the notion of interactive proofs and show their equivalence to each other and to the complexity class PSPACE. We introduce probabilistically checkable proofs, which are special forms of interactive proofs and show through sequence of intermediate results that the class NP has probabilistically checkable proofs of very special form and very small complexity. Using this we conclude that several NP hard problems are not even weakly approximable in polynomial time unless P = NP