Strengths and Weaknesses of Quantum Fingerprinting

We study the power of quantum fingerprints in the simultaneous message passing (SMP) setting of communication complexity. Yao recently showed how to simulate, with exponential overhead, classical shared-randomness SMP protocols by means of quantum SMP protocols without shared randomness ($Q^\parallel$-protocols). Our first result is to extend Yao's simulation to the strongest possible model: every many-round quantum protocol with unlimited shared entanglement can be simulated, with exponential overhead, by $Q^\parallel$-protocols. We apply our technique to obtain an efficient $Q^\parallel$-protocol for a function which cannot be efficiently solved through more restricted simulations. Second, we tightly characterize the power of the quantum fingerprinting technique by making a connection to arrangements of homogeneous halfspaces with maximal margin. These arrangements have been well studied in computational learning theory, and we use some strong results obtained in this area to exhibit weaknesses of quantum fingerprinting. In particular, this implies that for almost all functions, quantum fingerprinting protocols are exponentially worse than classical deterministic SMP protocols.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, to appear in CCC'0

Quantum Communication Cannot Simulate a Public Coin

We study the simultaneous message passing model of communication complexity. Building on the quantum fingerprinting protocol of Buhrman et al., Yao recently showed that a large class of efficient classical public-coin protocols can be turned into efficient quantum protocols without public coin. This raises the question whether this can be done always, i.e. whether quantum communication can always replace a public coin in the SMP model. We answer this question in the negative, exhibiting a communication problem where classical communication with public coin is exponentially more efficient than quantum communication. Together with a separation in the other direction due to Bar-Yossef et al., this shows that the quantum SMP model is incomparable with the classical public-coin SMP model. In addition we give a characterization of the power of quantum fingerprinting by means of a connection to geometrical tools from machine learning, a quadratic improvement of Yao's simulation, and a nearly tight analysis of the Hamming distance problem from Yao's paper.Comment: 12 pages LaTe

Exponential Separation of Quantum and Classical One-Way Communication Complexity for a Boolean Function

We give an exponential separation between one-way quantum and classical communication complexity for a Boolean function. Earlier such a separation was known only for a relation. A very similar result was obtained earlier but independently by Kerenidis and Raz [KR06]. Our version of the result gives an example in the bounded storage model of cryptography, where the key is secure if the adversary has a certain amount of classical storage, but is completely insecure if he has a similar amount of quantum storage.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Generalized Performance of Concatenated Quantum Codes -- A Dynamical Systems Approach

We apply a dynamical systems approach to concatenation of quantum error correcting codes, extending and generalizing the results of Rahn et al. [1] to both diagonal and nondiagonal channels. Our point of view is global: instead of focusing on particular types of noise channels, we study the geometry of the coding map as a discrete-time dynamical system on the entire space of noise channels. In the case of diagonal channels, we show that any code with distance at least three corrects (in the infinite concatenation limit) an open set of errors. For Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes, we give a more precise characterization of that set. We show how to incorporate noise in the gates, thus completing the framework. We derive some general bounds for noise channels, which allows us to analyze several codes in detail.Comment: 12 pages two-column format, no figures, slightly revised versio