Pseudorandom Self-Reductions for NP-Complete Problems

A language L is random-self-reducible if deciding membership in L can be reduced (in polynomial time) to deciding membership in L for uniformly random instances. It is known that several "number theoretic" languages (such as computing the permanent of a matrix) admit random self-reductions. Feigenbaum and Fortnow showed that NP-complete languages are not non-adaptively random-self-reducible unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses, giving suggestive evidence that NP may not admit random self-reductions. Hirahara and Santhanam introduced a weakening of random self-reductions that they called pseudorandom self-reductions, in which a language L is reduced to a distribution that is computationally indistinguishable from the uniform distribution. They then showed that the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) admits a non-adaptive pseudorandom self-reduction, and suggested that this gave further evidence that distinguished MCSP from standard NP-Complete problems. We show that, in fact, the Clique problem admits a non-adaptive pseudorandom self-reduction, assuming the planted clique conjecture. More generally we show the following. Call a property of graphs ? hereditary if G ? ? implies H ? ? for every induced subgraph of G. We show that for any infinite hereditary property ?, the problem of finding a maximum induced subgraph H ? ? of a given graph G admits a non-adaptive pseudorandom self-reduction

A complete criterion for separability detection

Using new results on the separability properties of bosonic systems, we provide a new complete criterion for separability. This criterion aims at characterizing the set of separable states from the inside by means of a sequence of efficiently solvable semidefinite programs. We apply this method to derive arbitrarily good approximations to the optimal measure-and-prepare strategy in generic state estimation problems. Finally, we report its performance in combination with the criterion developed by Doherty et al. [1] for the calculation of the entanglement robustness of a relevant family of quantum states whose separability properties were unknown

Nested quantum search and NP-complete problems

A quantum algorithm is known that solves an unstructured search problem in a number of iterations of order $\sqrt{d}$, where $d$ is the dimension of the search space, whereas any classical algorithm necessarily scales as $O(d)$. It is shown here that an improved quantum search algorithm can be devised that exploits the structure of a tree search problem by nesting this standard search algorithm. The number of iterations required to find the solution of an average instance of a constraint satisfaction problem scales as $\sqrt{d^\alpha}$, with a constant $\alpha<1$ depending on the nesting depth and the problem considered. When applying a single nesting level to a problem with constraints of size 2 such as the graph coloring problem, this constant $\alpha$ is estimated to be around 0.62 for average instances of maximum difficulty. This corresponds to a square-root speedup over a classical nested search algorithm, of which our presented algorithm is the quantum counterpart.Comment: 18 pages RevTeX, 3 Postscript figure