The Communication Complexity of the Hamming Distance Problem

We investigate the randomized and quantum communication complexity of the Hamming Distance problem, which is to determine if the Hamming distance between two n-bit strings is no less than a threshold d. We prove a quantum lower bound of \Omega(d) qubits in the general interactive model with shared prior entanglement. We also construct a classical protocol of O(d \log d) bits in the restricted Simultaneous Message Passing model, improving previous protocols of O(d^2) bits (A. C.-C. Yao, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 77-81, 2003), and O(d\log n) bits (D. Gavinsky, J. Kempe, and R. de Wolf, quant-ph/0411051, 2004).Comment: 8 pages, v3, updated reference. to appear in Information Processing Letters, 200

Improved Quantum Communication Complexity Bounds for Disjointness and Equality

We prove new bounds on the quantum communication complexity of the disjointness and equality problems. For the case of exact and non-deterministic protocols we show that these complexities are all equal to n+1, the previous best lower bound being n/2. We show this by improving a general bound for non-deterministic protocols of de Wolf. We also give an O(sqrt{n}c^{log^* n})-qubit bounded-error protocol for disjointness, modifying and improving the earlier O(sqrt{n}log n) protocol of Buhrman, Cleve, and Wigderson, and prove an Omega(sqrt{n}) lower bound for a large class of protocols that includes the BCW-protocol as well as our new protocol.Comment: 11 pages LaTe

Exponential Separation of Quantum and Classical Online Space Complexity

Although quantum algorithms realizing an exponential time speed-up over the best known classical algorithms exist, no quantum algorithm is known performing computation using less space resources than classical algorithms. In this paper, we study, for the first time explicitly, space-bounded quantum algorithms for computational problems where the input is given not as a whole, but bit by bit. We show that there exist such problems that a quantum computer can solve using exponentially less work space than a classical computer. More precisely, we introduce a very natural and simple model of a space-bounded quantum online machine and prove an exponential separation of classical and quantum online space complexity, in the bounded-error setting and for a total language. The language we consider is inspired by a communication problem (the set intersection function) that Buhrman, Cleve and Wigderson used to show an almost quadratic separation of quantum and classical bounded-error communication complexity. We prove that, in the framework of online space complexity, the separation becomes exponential.Comment: 13 pages. v3: minor change

Superlinear advantage for exact quantum algorithms

A quantum algorithm is exact if, on any input data, it outputs the correct answer with certainty (probability 1). A key question is: how big is the advantage of exact quantum algorithms over their classical counterparts: deterministic algorithms. For total Boolean functions in the query model, the biggest known gap was just a factor of 2: PARITY of N inputs bits requires $N$ queries classically but can be computed with N/2 queries by an exact quantum algorithm. We present the first example of a Boolean function f(x_1, ..., x_N) for which exact quantum algorithms have superlinear advantage over the deterministic algorithms. Any deterministic algorithm that computes our function must use N queries but an exact quantum algorithm can compute it with O(N^{0.8675...}) queries.Comment: 20 pages, v6: small number of small correction