Complexity of Graph State Preparation

The graph state formalism is a useful abstraction of entanglement. It is used in some multipartite purification schemes and it adequately represents universal resources for measurement-only quantum computation. We focus in this paper on the complexity of graph state preparation. We consider the number of ancillary qubits, the size of the primitive operators, and the duration of preparation. For each lexicographic order over these parameters we give upper and lower bounds for the complexity of graph state preparation. The first part motivates our work and introduces basic notions and notations for the study of graph states. Then we study some graph properties of graph states, characterizing their minimal degree by local unitary transformations, we propose an algorithm to reduce the degree of a graph state, and show the relationship with Sutner sigma-game. These properties are used in the last part, where algorithms and lower bounds for each lexicographic order over the considered parameters are presented.Comment: 17 page

Lower Bounds for Approximating Graph Parameters via Communication Complexity

In a celebrated work, Blais, Brody, and Matulef [Blais et al., 2012] developed a technique for proving property testing lower bounds via reductions from communication complexity. Their work focused on testing properties of functions, and yielded new lower bounds as well as simplified analyses of known lower bounds. Here, we take a further step in generalizing the methodology of [Blais et al., 2012] to analyze the query complexity of graph parameter estimation problems. In particular, our technique decouples the lower bound arguments from the representation of the graph, allowing it to work with any query type. We illustrate our technique by providing new simpler proofs of previously known tight lower bounds for the query complexity of several graph problems: estimating the number of edges in a graph, sampling edges from an almost-uniform distribution, estimating the number of triangles (and more generally, r-cliques) in a graph, and estimating the moments of the degree distribution of a graph. We also prove new lower bounds for estimating the edge connectivity of a graph and estimating the number of instances of any fixed subgraph in a graph. We show that the lower bounds for estimating the number of triangles and edge connectivity also hold in a strictly stronger computational model that allows access to uniformly random edge samples

Quantum query complexity of minor-closed graph properties

We study the quantum query complexity of minor-closed graph properties, which include such problems as determining whether an $n$-vertex graph is planar, is a forest, or does not contain a path of a given length. We show that most minor-closed properties---those that cannot be characterized by a finite set of forbidden subgraphs---have quantum query complexity \Theta(n^{3/2}). To establish this, we prove an adversary lower bound using a detailed analysis of the structure of minor-closed properties with respect to forbidden topological minors and forbidden subgraphs. On the other hand, we show that minor-closed properties (and more generally, sparse graph properties) that can be characterized by finitely many forbidden subgraphs can be solved strictly faster, in o(n^{3/2}) queries. Our algorithms are a novel application of the quantum walk search framework and give improved upper bounds for several subgraph-finding problems.Comment: v1: 25 pages, 2 figures. v2: 26 page

New bounds on the classical and quantum communication complexity of some graph properties

We study the communication complexity of a number of graph properties where the edges of the graph $G$ are distributed between Alice and Bob (i.e., each receives some of the edges as input). Our main results are: * An Omega(n) lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of deciding whether an n-vertex graph G is connected, nearly matching the trivial classical upper bound of O(n log n) bits of communication. * A deterministic upper bound of O(n^{3/2}log n) bits for deciding if a bipartite graph contains a perfect matching, and a quantum lower bound of Omega(n) for this problem. * A Theta(n^2) bound for the randomized communication complexity of deciding if a graph has an Eulerian tour, and a Theta(n^{3/2}) bound for the quantum communication complexity of this problem. The first two quantum lower bounds are obtained by exhibiting a reduction from the n-bit Inner Product problem to these graph problems, which solves an open question of Babai, Frankl and Simon. The third quantum lower bound comes from recent results about the quantum communication complexity of composed functions. We also obtain essentially tight bounds for the quantum communication complexity of a few other problems, such as deciding if G is triangle-free, or if G is bipartite, as well as computing the determinant of a distributed matrix.Comment: 12 pages LaTe

On the Relative Strength of Pebbling and Resolution

The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games in the context of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven a useful tool for studying resolution-based proof systems when comparing the strength of different subsystems, showing bounds on proof space, and establishing size-space trade-offs. The typical approach has been to encode the pebble game played on a graph as a CNF formula and then argue that proofs of this formula must inherit (various aspects of) the pebbling properties of the underlying graph. Unfortunately, the reductions used here are not tight. To simulate resolution proofs by pebblings, the full strength of nondeterministic black-white pebbling is needed, whereas resolution is only known to be able to simulate deterministic black pebbling. To obtain strong results, one therefore needs to find specific graph families which either have essentially the same properties for black and black-white pebbling (not at all true in general) or which admit simulations of black-white pebblings in resolution. This paper contributes to both these approaches. First, we design a restricted form of black-white pebbling that can be simulated in resolution and show that there are graph families for which such restricted pebblings can be asymptotically better than black pebblings. This proves that, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, resolution can strictly beat black-only pebbling, and in particular that the space lower bounds on pebbling formulas in [Ben-Sasson and Nordstrom 2008] are tight. Second, we present a versatile parametrized graph family with essentially the same properties for black and black-white pebbling, which gives sharp simultaneous trade-offs for black and black-white pebbling for various parameter settings. Both of our contributions have been instrumental in obtaining the time-space trade-off results for resolution-based proof systems in [Ben-Sasson and Nordstrom 2009].Comment: Full-length version of paper to appear in Proceedings of the 25th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC '10), June 201

The Subgraph Testing Model

We initiate a study of testing properties of graphs that are presented as subgraphs of a fixed (or an explicitly given) graph. The tester is given free access to a base graph G=([n],E), and oracle access to a function f:E -> {0,1} that represents a subgraph of G. The tester is required to distinguish between subgraphs that posses a predetermined property and subgraphs that are far from possessing this property. We focus on bounded-degree base graphs and on the relation between testing graph properties in the subgraph model and testing the same properties in the bounded-degree graph model. We identify cases in which testing is significantly easier in one model than in the other as well as cases in which testing has approximately the same complexity in both models. Our proofs are based on the design and analysis of efficient testers and on the establishment of query-complexity lower bounds

On Nontrivial Separators for k-Page Graphs and Simulations by Nondeterministic One-Tape Turing Machines

We show that the following statements are equivalent: 1. Statement 1. 3-pushdown graphs have sublinear separators. 2. Statement 1∗. k-page graphs have sublinear separators. 3. Statement 2. A one-tape nondeterministic Turing machine can simulate a two-tape machine in subquadratic time. None of the statements is known to be true or false at present. However, our proof of equivalence is quantitative-it relates exactly the separator size of the two kinds of graphs to the running time of the simulation in Statement 2. Using this equivalence we derive several graph-theoretic corollaries. There are known examples where upper bounds on graph properties imply upper bounds on computation time or space. There are other examples where lower bounds on graph properties are used to derive lower bounds on computation time in restricted settings. However, our results may constitute the first example where a graph problem is shown to be equivalent to a problem in computational complexity. In a companion paper we construct graphs and prove a lower bound or their separators. Using the equivalence we prove an almost linear lower bound for the size of separators for 3-pushdown graphs and an almost quadratic lower bound for simulating two-tape nondeterministic Turing machines by one-tape machines. Specifically, for an integers s let ls(n), the s-iterated logarithm function, be defined inductively: l°(n)=n, ls+1(n)=log2(ls(n)) for s⩾0. Then: 1. For every fixed s and all n, there is an n-vertex 3-pushdown graph whose smallest separator contains at least ω(n/ls(n)) vertices.2. There is a language L recognizable in real time by a two-tape nondeterministic Turing machine, but every on-line one-tape nondeterministic Turing machine that recognizes L requires ω(n2/ls(n)) time for any positive integer