Quantum hedging in two-round prover-verifier interactions

We consider the problem of a particular kind of quantum correlation that arises in some two-party games. In these games, one player is presented with a question they must answer, yielding an outcome of either 'win' or 'lose'. Molina and Watrous (arXiv:1104.1140) studied such a game that exhibited a perfect form of hedging, where the risk of losing a first game can completely offset the corresponding risk for a second game. This is a non-classical quantum phenomenon, and establishes the impossibility of performing strong error-reduction for quantum interactive proof systems by parallel repetition, unlike for classical interactive proof systems. We take a step in this article towards a better understanding of the hedging phenomenon by giving a complete characterization of when perfect hedging is possible for a natural generalization of the game in arXiv:1104.1140. Exploring in a different direction the subject of quantum hedging, and motivated by implementation concerns regarding loss-tolerance, we also consider a variation of the protocol where the player who receives the question can choose to restart the game rather than return an answer. We show that in this setting there is no possible hedging for any game played with state spaces corresponding to finite-dimensional complex Euclidean spaces.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figure. Added work on connections with other result

Proving the power of postselection

It is a widely believed, though unproven, conjecture that the capability of postselection increases the language recognition power of both probabilistic and quantum polynomial-time computers. It is also unknown whether polynomial-time quantum machines with postselection are more powerful than their probabilistic counterparts with the same resource restrictions. We approach these problems by imposing additional constraints on the resources to be used by the computer, and are able to prove for the first time that postselection does augment the computational power of both classical and quantum computers, and that quantum does outperform probabilistic in this context, under simultaneous time and space bounds in a certain range. We also look at postselected versions of space-bounded classes, as well as those corresponding to error-free and one-sided error recognition, and provide classical characterizations. It is shown that $\mathsf{NL}$ would equal $\mathsf{RL}$ if the randomized machines had the postselection capability.Comment: 26 pages. This is a heavily improved version of arXiv:1102.066