The Mermin-Peres magic square game is a cooperative two-player nonlocal game in which shared quantum entanglement allows the players to win with certainty, while players limited to classical operations cannot do so, a phenomenon dubbed "quantum pseudo-telepathy". The game has a referee separately ask each player to color a subset of a 3x3 grid. The referee checks that their colorings satisfy certain parity constraints that can't all be simultaneously realized. We define a generalization of these games to be played on an arbitrary arrangement of intersecting sets of elements. We characterize exactly which of these games exhibit quantum pseudo-telepathy, and give quantum winning strategies for those that do. In doing so, we show that it suffices for the players to share three Bell pairs of entanglement even for games on arbitrarily large arrangements. Moreover, it suffices for Alice and Bob to use measurements from the three-qubit Pauli group. The proof technique uses a novel connection of Mermin-style games to graph planarity.
The Mermin-Peres magic square game is a cooperative two-player nonlocal game in which shared quantum entanglement allows the players to win with certainty, while players limited to classical operations cannot do so, a phenomenon dubbed "quantum pseudo-telepathy". The game has a referee separately ask each player to color a subset of a 3x3 grid. The referee checks that their colorings satisfy certain parity constraints that can't all be simultaneously realized. We define a generalization of these games to be played on an arbitrary arrangement of intersecting sets of elements. We characterize exactly which of these games exhibit quantum pseudo-telepathy, and give quantum winning strategies for those that do. In doing so, we show that it suffices for the players to share three Bell pairs of entanglement even for games on arbitrarily large arrangements. Moreover, it suffices for Alice and Bob to use measurements from the three-qubit Pauli group. The proof technique uses a novel connection of Mermin-style games to graph planarity.
Quantum pseudotelepathy is a strong form of nonlocality. Different from the conventional nonlocal games where quantum strategies win statistically, e.g., the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt game, quantum pseudotelepathy in principle allows quantum players to with probability 1. In this Letter, we report a faithful experimental demonstration of quantum pseudotelepathy via playing the nonlocal version of Mermin-Peres magic square game, where Alice and Bob cooperatively fill in a 3×3 magic square. We adopt the hyperentanglement scheme and prepare photon pairs entangled in both the polarization and the orbital angular momentum degrees of freedom, such that the experiment is carried out in a resource-efficient manner. Under the locality and fair-sampling assumption, our results show that quantum players can simultaneously win all the queries over any classical strategy.
Abstract Quantum pseudo-telepathy games, such as the Mermin–Peres magic square and the doily game (DG), theoretically allow players to win with unit probability when using entangled quantum strategies. We quantitatively characterize the quantum advantage in these games and compare it with violations of two Bell inequalities: the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt and the Collins–Gisin inequalities. The analysis is restricted to two families of two-qubit states: modified Werner states and Bell-diagonal states. For each case, we identify and quantify the regions of quantum state space that exhibit either a quantum advantage or a Bell inequality violation, relative to the set of all entangled states. Within these families, the DG encompasses a larger fraction of entangled states than the Mermin–Peres magic square game, although both cover significantly smaller regions of entangled states compared to those where Bell inequalities are violated. Although both approaches are fundamentally linked to quantum contextuality, our analysis of the examined two-qubit state families suggests that Bell inequalities are more effective at revealing entanglement, even if pseudo-telepathy games offer a more intuitive and conceptually appealing perspective.
A pseudo-telepathy game is a game for two or more players for which there is no classical winning strategy, but there is a winning strategy based on sharing quantum entanglement by the players. Since it is generally very hard to perfectly implement a quantum winning strategy for a pseudo-telepathy game, quantum players are almost certain to make errors even though they use a winning strategy. After introducing a model for pseudo-telepathy games, we investigate the impact of several basic noisy quantum channels on the quantum winning strategy for the Mermin-GHZ game. The question of how strong the noise can be so that quantum players would still be better than classical ones is also dealt with.
We present a generalization of the Mermin-Peres magic square game to N players, in which the square is replaced by an N-dimensional hypercube. We show that the winning probability of the optimal classical strategy remains 8/9 for all N, while for N≥3, a generalization of the quantum strategy for N=2 achieves a winning probability between 1/3 and 3/4. This loss of quantum advantage for N≥3 is a consequence of monogamy.
Nonlocal games provide a unified framework for studying the distinction between classical, quantum, and more general no-signaling correlations. In this work, we develop this perspective by connecting the Bell-locality framework to several complementary mathematical representations of nonlocal games and quantum strategies. We begin with local hidden-variable models, the CHSH inequality, and the role of Bell nonlocality as a device-independent witness of entanglement, and then introduce nonlocal games through the standard predicate/verifier formalism.
We next examine a set of representative examples, including XOR games, the GHZ game, graph-based coloring games, the Mermin-Peres magic square game, and Hardy's paradox as a related logical manifestation of nonlocality. Building on this foundation, we compare four closely related representation frameworks: conditional-probability and correlation descriptions, Bell-functional formulations, entangled-value optimization, and the quantum-operator approach together with the Navascues-Pironio-Acin (NPA) hierarchy. These viewpoints are then instantiated for the CHSH, magic square, and GHZ games, showing how each representation emphasizes a different aspect of the same underlying task.
Taken together, these examples show that nonlocal games can be studied simultaneously as geometric objects in correlation space, optimization problems over entangled resources, and operator-theoretic constructions. This multi-representation viewpoint clarifies the relation between Bell inequality violations, perfect quantum strategies, pseudo-telepathy, and semidefinite relaxations of quantum correlations.
Abstract It is known that Mermin-Peres like proofs of quantum contextuality can furnish non-local games with a guaranteed quantum strategy, when classically no such guarantee can exist. This phenomenon, also called quantum pseudo-telepathy, has been studied in the case of the so-called Mermin Magic square game. In this paper we review in detail two different ways of implementing on a quantum computer such a game and propose a new Doily game based on the geometry of 2-qubit Pauli group. We show that the quantumness of these games are almost revealed when we play them on the IBM Quantum Experience, however the inherent noise in the available quantum machines prevents a full demonstration of the non-classical aspects.