This project focused on upper and lower bounds for quantum computability using constant depth quantum circuits, and on the complexity theory of such circuits. It established significant differences between resource bounded quantum and classical computation models, particularly emphasizing new examples of where quantum circuits are more powerful than their classical counterparts. A second focus and outgrowth of this work was the creation of efficient quantum algorithms for specific problems and central combinatorial functions. Recent finding include upper bounds for the computational power of constant depth circuits composed of single qubit and CNOT gates, and lower bounds for the computational power of constant depth circuits with single qubit, CNOT and fanout gates. These results represent the power and the limits of small, possibly realizable quantum circuits. Also examined were bounds on computations with additional storage qubits (ancillae), and natural simple functions (realized by small depth circuits) which require ancillae for their computation.
We show that Nechiporuk's method [I. Wegener, The Complexity of Boolean Functions, Teubner-Wiley, New York, 1987] for proving lower bounds for Boolean formulas can be extended to the quantum case. This leads to an Ω(n2/log2n) lower bound for quantum formulas computing an explicit function. The only known previous explicit lower bound for quantum formulas [A. Yao, Proceedings of 34th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1993, pp. 352--361] states that the majority function does not have a linear-size quantum formula. We also show that quantum formulas can be simulated by Boolean circuits of almost the same size.
Abstract Given a unitary transformation, what is the size of the smallest quantum circuit that implements it? This quantity, known as the quantum circuit complexity, is a fundamental property of quantum evolutions that has widespread applications in many fields, including quantum computation, quantum field theory, and black hole physics. In this paper, we obtain a new lower bound for the quantum circuit complexity in terms of a novel complexity measure that we propose for quantum circuits, which we call the quantum Wasserstein complexity. Our proposed measure is based on the quantum Wasserstein distance of order one (also called the quantum earth mover’s distance), a metric on the space of quantum states. We also prove several fundamental and important properties of our new complexity measure, which stand to be of independent interest. Finally, we show that our new measure also provides a lower bound for the experimental cost of implementing quantum circuits, which implies a quantum limit on converting quantum resources to computational resources. Our results provide novel applications of the quantum Wasserstein distance and pave the way for a deeper understanding of the resources needed to implement a quantum computation.
We have seen in the previous chapters that quantum computers seem to be more powerful than classical computers for certain problems. There are limits on the power of quantum computers, however. Since a classical computer can simulate a quantum computer, a quantum computer can only compute the same set of functions that a classical computer can. The advantage of using a quantum computer is that the amount of resources needed by a quantum algorithm might be much less than what is needed by the best classical algorithm. In Section 9.1 we briefly define some classical and quantum complexity classes and give some relationships between them. Most of the interesting questions relating classical and quantum complexity classes remain open. For example, we do not yet know if a quantum computer is capable of efficiently solving an NP-complete problem (defined later). One can prove upper bounds on the difficulty of a problem by providing an algorithm that solves that problem, and proving that it will work within in a given running time. But how does one prove a lower bound on the computational complexity of a problem? For example, if we wish to find the product of two n-bit numbers, computing the answer requires outputting roughly 2n bits and that requires Ω(n) steps (in any computing model with finite-sized gates). The best-known upper bound for integer multiplication is O(n log n log log n) steps. It has proved extremely difficult to derive non-trivial lower bounds on the computational complexity of a problem. Most of the known non-trivial lower bounds are in the ‘black-box’ model (for both classical and quantum computing), where we only query the input via a ‘black-box’ of a specific form. We discuss the black-box model in more detail in Section 9.2. We then sketch several approaches for proving black-box lower bounds. The first technique has been called the ‘hybrid method’ and was used to prove that quantum searching requires Ω(√n) queries to succeed with constant probability. The second technique is called the ‘polynomial method’. We then describe a technique based on ‘block sensitivity’, and conclude with a technique known as the ‘adversary method’.
In this work, we initiate the study of the Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) in the quantum setting. MCSP is a problem to compute the circuit complexity of Boolean functions. It is a fascinating problem in complexity theory - its hardness is mysterious, and a better understanding of its hardness can have surprising implications to many fields in computer science. We first define and investigate the basic complexity-theoretic properties of minimum quantum circuit size problems for three natural objects: Boolean functions, unitaries, and quantum states. We show that these problems are not trivially in NP but in QCMA (or have QCMA protocols). Next, we explore the relations between the three quantum MCSPs and their variants. We discover that some reductions that are not known for classical MCSP exist for quantum MCSPs for unitaries and states, e.g., search-to-decision reductions and self-reductions. Finally, we systematically generalize results known for classical MCSP to the quantum setting (including quantum cryptography, quantum learning theory, quantum circuit lower bounds, and quantum fine-grained complexity) and also find new connections to tomography and quantum gravity. Due to the fundamental differences between classical and quantum circuits, most of our results require extra care and reveal properties and phenomena unique to the quantum setting. Our findings could be of interest for future studies, and we post several open problems for further exploration along this direction.