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arXiv:2112.00024

Quantum computational advantage implies contextuality

Farid Shähandeh

Published Nov 30, 2021• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We show that a separation between the class of all problems that can efficiently be solved on a quantum computer and those solvable using probabilistic classical algorithms in polynomial time implies the generalized contextuality of quantum algorithms. Our result subsumes versions of Gottesman-Knill theorem as special cases.
DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2112.00024

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I study the class of problems efficiently solvable by a quantum computer, given the ability to ‘postselect’ on the outcomes of measurements. I prove that this class coincides with a classical complexity class called PP, or probabilistic polynomial-time. Using this result, I show that several simple changes to the axioms of quantum mechanics would let us solve PP-complete problems efficiently. The result also implies, as an easy corollary, a celebrated theorem of Beigel, Reingold and Spielman that PP is closed under intersection, as well as a generalization of that theorem due to Fortnow and Reingold. This illustrates that quantum computing can yield new and simpler proofs of major results about classical computation.
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I study the class of problems efficiently solvable by a quantum computer, given the ability to "postselect" on the outcomes of measurements. I prove that this class coincides with a classical complexity class called PP, or Probabilistic Polynomial-Time. Using this result, I show that several simple changes to the axioms of quantum mechanics would let us solve PP-complete problems efficiently. The result also implies, as an easy corollary, a celebrated theorem of Beigel, Reingold, and Spielman that PP is closed under intersection, as well as a generalization of that theorem due to Fortnow and Reingold. This illustrates that quantum computing can yield new and simpler proofs of major results about classical computation.
This paper continues the study of the power of oracles to separate quantum com.plexity classes from classical (including probabilistic and nondeterministic) complexity classes, which we initiated in an earlier paper [5]. The new results are that, under appropriate oracles, (1) there is a decision problem that can be solved in polynomial time on the quantum computer, which would classically require exponential time in the worst case even on a nondeterministic computer (in particular QP g NP relative to this oracle), and (2) there is a decision problem that can be solved in exponential time on the quantum computer for which any deterministic classical computer would require double exponential time on all but finitely many instances.
Contextuality has been conjectured to be a super-classical resource for quantum computation, analogous to the role of non-locality as a super-classical resource for communication. We show that the presence of contextuality places a lower bound on the amount of classical memory required to simulate any quantum sub-theory, thereby establishing a quantitative connection between contextuality and classical simulability. We apply our result to the qubit stabilizer sub-theory, where the presence of state-independent contextuality has been an obstacle in establishing contextuality as a quantum computational resource. We find that the presence of contextuality in this sub-theory demands that the minimum number of classical bits of memory required to simulate a multi-qubit system must scale quadratically in the number of qubits; notably, this is the same scaling as the Gottesman-Knill algorithm. We contrast this result with the (non-contextual) qudit case, where linear scaling is possible.