Quantum and Classical Tradeoffs

We propose an approach for quantifying a quantum circuit's quantumness as a means to understand the nature of quantum algorithmic speedups. Since quantum gates that do not preserve the computational basis are necessary for achieving quantum speedups, it appears natural to define the quantumness of a quantum circuit using the number of such gates. Intuitively, a reduction in the quantumness requires an increase in the amount of classical computation, hence giving a ``quantum and classical tradeoff''. In this paper we present two results on this direction. The first gives an asymptotic answer to the question: ``what is the minimum number of non-basis-preserving gates required to generate a good approximation to a given state''. This question is the quantum analogy of the following classical question, ``how many fair coins are needed to generate a given probability distribution'', which was studied and resolved by Knuth and Yao in 1976. Our second result shows that any quantum algorithm that solves Grover's Problem of size n using k queries and l levels of non-basis-preserving gates must have k*l=\Omega(n)

Quantum-classical tradeoffs and multi-controlled quantum gate decompositions in variational algorithms

Quantum algorithms for unconstrained optimization problems, such as the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), have been proposed as interesting near-term algorithms which operate under a hybrid quantum-classical execution model. Recent work has shown that the QAOA can also be applied to constrained combinatorial optimization problems by incorporating the problem constraints within the design of the variational ansatz - often resulting in quantum circuits containing many multi-controlled gate operations. This paper investigates potential resource tradeoffs for the QAOA when applied to the particular constrained optimization problem of Maximum Independent Set. We consider three variants of the QAOA which make different tradeoffs between the number of classical parameters, quantum gates, and iterations of classical optimization. We also study the quantum cost of decomposing the QAOA circuits on hardware which may support different qubit technologies and native gate sets, and compare the different algorithms using the gate decomposition score which combines the fidelity of the gate operations with the efficiency of the decomposition into a single metric. We find that all three QAOA variants can attain similar performance but the classical and quantum resource costs may vary greatly between them.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

A New Quantum Lower Bound Method, with Applications to Direct Product Theorems and Time-Space Tradeoffs

We give a new version of the adversary method for proving lower bounds on quantum query algorithms. The new method is based on analyzing the eigenspace structure of the problem at hand. We use it to prove a new and optimal strong direct product theorem for 2-sided error quantum algorithms computing k independent instances of a symmetric Boolean function: if the algorithm uses significantly less than k times the number of queries needed for one instance of the function, then its success probability is exponentially small in k. We also use the polynomial method to prove a direct product theorem for 1-sided error algorithms for k threshold functions with a stronger bound on the success probability. Finally, we present a quantum algorithm for evaluating solutions to systems of linear inequalities, and use our direct product theorems to show that the time-space tradeoff of this algorithm is close to optimal.Comment: 16 pages LaTeX. Version 2: title changed, proofs significantly cleaned up and made selfcontained. This version to appear in the proceedings of the STOC 06 conferenc

Quantum Reverse Shannon Theorem

Dual to the usual noisy channel coding problem, where a noisy (classical or quantum) channel is used to simulate a noiseless one, reverse Shannon theorems concern the use of noiseless channels to simulate noisy ones, and more generally the use of one noisy channel to simulate another. For channels of nonzero capacity, this simulation is always possible, but for it to be efficient, auxiliary resources of the proper kind and amount are generally required. In the classical case, shared randomness between sender and receiver is a sufficient auxiliary resource, regardless of the nature of the source, but in the quantum case the requisite auxiliary resources for efficient simulation depend on both the channel being simulated, and the source from which the channel inputs are coming. For tensor power sources (the quantum generalization of classical IID sources), entanglement in the form of standard ebits (maximally entangled pairs of qubits) is sufficient, but for general sources, which may be arbitrarily correlated or entangled across channel inputs, additional resources, such as entanglement-embezzling states or backward communication, are generally needed. Combining existing and new results, we establish the amounts of communication and auxiliary resources needed in both the classical and quantum cases, the tradeoffs among them, and the loss of simulation efficiency when auxiliary resources are absent or insufficient. In particular we find a new single-letter expression for the excess forward communication cost of coherent feedback simulations of quantum channels (i.e. simulations in which the sender retains what would escape into the environment in an ordinary simulation), on non-tensor-power sources in the presence of unlimited ebits but no other auxiliary resource. Our results on tensor power sources establish a strong converse to the entanglement-assisted capacity theorem.Comment: 35 pages, to appear in IEEE-IT. v2 has a fixed proof of the Clueless Eve result, a new single-letter formula for the "spread deficit", better error scaling, and an improved strong converse. v3 and v4 each make small improvements to the presentation and add references. v5 fixes broken reference