David Gosset, Robin Kothari, Chenyi Zhang (Oct 09 2025).
Abstract: Prior work of Beverland et al. has shown that any exact Clifford+
T implementation of the
n-qubit Toffoli gate must use at least
n T gates. Here we show how to get away with exponentially fewer
T gates, at the cost of incurring a tiny
1/poly(n) error that can be neglected in most practical situations. More precisely, the
n-qubit Toffoli gate can be implemented to within error
ϵ in the diamond distance by a randomly chosen Clifford+
T circuit with at most
O(log(1/ϵ)) T gates. We also give a matching
Ω(log(1/ϵ)) lower bound that establishes optimality, and we show that any purely unitary implementation achieving even constant error must use
Ω(n) T gates. We also extend our sampling technique to implement other Boolean functions. Finally, we describe upper and lower bounds on the
T-count of Boolean functions in terms of non-adaptive parity decision tree complexity and its randomized analogue.