Entangled games are a quantum analog of constraint satisfaction problems and have had important applications to quantum complexity theory, quantum cryptography, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Given a game, the basic computational problem is to compute its entangled value: the supremum success probability attainable by a quantum strategy. We study the complexity of computing the (commuting-operator) entangled value omega^* of entangled XOR games with any number of players. Based on a duality theory for systems of operator equations, we introduce necessary and sufficient criteria for an XOR game to have omega^* = 1, and use these criteria to derive the following results: 1) An algorithm for symmetric games that decides in polynomial time whether omega^* = 1 or omega^* < 1, a task that was not previously known to be decidable, together with a simple tensor-product strategy that achieves value 1 in the former case. The only previous candidate algorithm for this problem was the Navascués-Pironio-Acín (also known as noncommutative Sum of Squares or ncSoS) hierarchy, but no convergence bounds were known. 2) A family of games with three players and with omega^* < 1, where it takes doubly exponential time for the ncSoS algorithm to witness this. By contrast, our algorithm runs in polynomial time. 3) Existence of an unsatisfiable phase for random (non-symmetric) XOR games. We show that there exists a constant C_k^{unsat} depending only on the number k of players, such that a random k-XOR game over an alphabet of size n has omega^* < 1 with high probability when the number of clauses is above C_k^{unsat} n. 4) A lower bound of Omega(n log(n)/log log(n)) on the number of levels in the ncSoS hierarchy required to detect unsatisfiability for most random 3-XOR games. This is in contrast with the classical case where the (3n)^{th} level of the sum-of-squares hierarchy is equivalent to brute-force enumeration of all possible solutions.
We study the complexity of computing the commuting-operator value
ω∗ of entangled XOR games with any number of players. We introduce necessary and sufficient criteria for an XOR game to have
ω∗=1, and use these criteria to derive the following results: 1. An algorithm for symmetric games that decides in polynomial time whether
ω∗=1 or
ω∗<1, a task that was not previously known to be decidable, together with a simple tensor-product strategy that achieves value 1 in the former case. The only previous candidate algorithm for this problem was the Navascués-Pironio-Acín (also known as noncommutative Sum of Squares or ncSoS) hierarchy, but no convergence bounds were known. 2. A family of games with three players and with
ω∗<1, where it takes doubly exponential time for the ncSoS algorithm to witness this (in contrast with our algorithm which runs in polynomial time). 3. A family of games achieving a bias difference
2(ω∗−ω) arbitrarily close to the maximum possible value of
1 (and as a consequence, achieving an unbounded bias ratio), answering an open question of Briët and Vidick. 4. Existence of an unsatisfiable phase for random (non-symmetric) XOR games: that is, we show that there exists a constant
Ckunsat depending only on the number
k of players, such that a random
k-XOR game over an alphabet of size
n has
ω∗<1 with high probability when the number of clauses is above
Ckunsatn. 5. A lower bound of
Ω(nlog(n)/loglog(n)) on the number of levels in the ncSoS hierarchy required to detect unsatisfiability for most random 3-XOR games. This is in contrast with the classical case where the
n-th level of the sum-of-squares hierarchy is equivalent to brute-force enumeration of all possible solutions.
Tsirelson’s problem asks whether the commuting operator model for two-party quantum correlations is equivalent to the tensor-product model. We give a negative answer to this question by showing that there are non-local games which have perfect commuting-operator strategies, but do not have perfect tensor-product strategies. The weak Tsirelson problem, which is known to be equivalent to the Connes embedding problem, remains open. The examples we construct are instances of (binary) linear system games. For such games, previous results state that the existence of perfect strategies is controlled by the solution group of the linear system. Our main result is that every finitely-presented group embeds in some solution group. As an additional consequence, we show that the problem of determining whether a linear system game has a perfect commuting-operator strategy is undecidable.
We consider quantum XOR games, defined in the work of Regev and Vidick [ACM Trans. Comput. Theory 7, 43 (2015)], from the perspective of unitary correlations defined in the work of Harris and Paulsen [Integr. Equations Oper. Theory 89, 125 (2017)]. We show that the winning bias of a quantum XOR game in the tensor product model (respectively, the commuting model) is equal to the norm of its associated linear functional on the unitary correlation set from the appropriate model. We show that Connes’ embedding problem has a positive answer if and only if every quantum XOR game has entanglement bias equal to the commuting bias. In particular, the embedding problem is equivalent to determining whether every quantum XOR game G with a winning strategy in the commuting model also has a winning strategy in the approximate finite-dimensional model.
We study multipartite entanglement in the context of XOR games. In particular, we study the ratio of the entangled and classical biases, which measure the maximum advantage of a quantum or classical strategy over a uniformly random strategy. For the case of two-player XOR games, Tsirelson proved that this ratio is upper bounded by the celebrated Grothendieck constant. In contrast, Pérez-García et al. proved the existence of entangled states that give quantum players an unbounded advantage over classical players in a three-player XOR game. We show that the multipartite entangled states that are most often seen in today's literature can only lead to a bias that is a constant factor larger than the classical bias. These states include GHZ states, any state local-unitarily equivalent to combinations of GHZ and maximally entangled states shared between different subsets of the players (e.g., stabilizer states), as well as generalizations of GHZ states of the form Σiαi|i〉... |i〉 for arbitrary amplitudes αi. Our results have the following surprising consequence: classical three-player XOR games do not follow an XOR parallel repetition theorem, even a very weak one. Besides this, we discuss implications of our results for communication complexity and hardness of approximation. Our proofs are based on novel applications of extensions of Grothendieck's inequality, due to Blei and Tonge, and Carne, generalizing Tsirelson's use of Grothendieck's inequality to bound the bias of two-player XOR games.
Recent results showed it was possible to determine if a modest size 3XOR game has a perfect quantum strategy. We build on these and give an explicit polynomial time algorithm which constructs such a perfect strategy or refutes its existence. This new tool lets us numerically study the behavior of randomly generated 3XOR games with large numbers of questions. A key issue is: how common are pseudotelephathy games (games with perfect quantum strategies but no perfect classical strategies)? Our experiments strongly indicate that the probability of a randomly generated game being pseudotelpathic stays far from 1, indeed it is bounded below 0.15. We also find strong evidence that randomly generated 3XOR games undergo both a quantum and classical "phase transition", transitioning from almost certainly perfect to almost certainly imperfect as the ratio of number of clauses (
m) to number of questions (
n) increases. The locations of these two phase transitions appear to coincide at
m/n≈2.74.