The paper presents the first nontrivial upper and lower bounds for
(non-oblivious) quantum read-once branching programs. It is shown that the
computational power of quantum and classical read-once branching programs is
incomparable in the following sense: (i) A simple, explicit boolean function on
2n input bits is presented that is computable by error-free quantum read-once
branching programs of size O(n^3), while each classical randomized read-once
branching program and each quantum OBDD for this function with bounded
two-sided error requires size 2^{\Omega(n)}. (ii) Quantum branching programs
reading each input variable exactly once are shown to require size
2^{\Omega(n)} for computing the set-disjointness function DISJ_n from
communication complexity theory with two-sided error bounded by a constant
smaller than 1/2-2\sqrt{3}/7. This function is trivially computable even by
deterministic OBDDs of linear size. The technically most involved part is the
proof of the lower bound in (ii). For this, a new model of quantum
multi-partition communication protocols is introduced and a suitable extension
of the information cost technique of Jain, Radhakrishnan, and Sen (2003) to
this model is presented.Comment: 35 pages. Lower bound for disjointness: Error in application of info
theory corrected and regularity of quantum read-once BPs (each variable at
least once) added as additional assumption of the theorem. Some more informal
explanations adde