The area of property testing tries to design algorithms that can efficiently handle very large amounts of data: given a large object that either has a certain property or is somehow "far" from having that property, a tester should efficiently distinguish between these two cases. In this survey we describe recent results obtained for quantum property testing. This area naturally falls into three parts. First, we may consider quantum testers for properties of classical objects. We survey the main examples known where quantum testers can be much (sometimes exponentially) more efficient than classical testers. Second, we may consider classical testers of quantum objects. This is the situation that arises for instance when one is trying to determine if quantum states or operations do what they are supposed to do, based only on classical input-output behavior. Finally, we may also consider quantum testers for properties of quantum objects, such as states or operations. We survey known bounds on testing various natural properties, such as whether two states are equal, whether a state is separable, whether two operations commute, etc. We also highlight connections to other areas of quantum information theory and mention a number of open questions.
The area of property testing tries to design algorithms that can efficiently handle very large amounts of data: given a large object that either has a certain property or is somehow “far” from having that property, a tester should efficiently distinguish between these two cases. In this survey we describe recent results obtained for quantum property testing. This area naturally falls into three parts. First, we may consider quantum testers for properties of classical objects. We survey the main examples known where quantum testers can be much (sometimes exponentially) more efficient than classical testers. Second, we may consider classical testers of quantum objects. These arise for instance when one is trying to determine if quantum states or operations do what they are supposed to do, based only on classical input-output behavior. Finally, we may also consider quantum testers for properties of quantum objects, such as states or operations. We survey known bounds on testing various natural properties, such as whether two states are equal, whether a state is separable, whether two operations commute, etc. We also highlight connections to other areas of quantum information theory and mention a number of open questions.
We construct efficient or query efficient quantum property testers for two existential group properties which have exponential query complexity both for their decision problem in the quantum and for their testing problem in the classical model of computing. These are periodicity in groups and the common coset range property of two functions having identical ranges within each coset of some normal subgroup. Our periodicity tester is efficient in Abelian groups and generalizes, in several aspects, previous periodicity testers. This is achieved by introducing a technique refining the majority correction process widely used for proving robustness of algebraic properties. The periodicity tester in non-Abelian groups and the common coset range tester are query efficient.
We construct efficient or query efficient quantum property testers for two existential group properties which have exponential query complexity both for their decision problem in the quantum and for their testing problem in the classical model of computing. These are periodicity in groups and the common coset range property of two functions having identical ranges within each coset of some normal subgroup. Our periodicity tester is efficient in Abelian groups and generalizes, in several aspects, previous periodicity testers. This is achieved by introducing a technique refining the majority correction process widely used for proving robustness of algebraic properties. The periodicity tester in non-Abelian groups and the common coset range tester are query efficient.
In this paper we consider the problem of testing whether two finite groups are isomorphic. Whereas the case where both groups are abelian is well understood and can be solved efficiently, very little is known about the complexity of isomorphism testing for nonabelian groups. Le Gall has constructed an efficient classical algorithm for a class of groups corresponding to one of the most natural ways of constructing nonabelian groups from abelian groups: the groups that are extensions of an abelian group
A by a cyclic group
Zm with the order of
A coprime with
m. More precisely, the running time of that algorithm is almost linear in the order of the input groups. In this paper we present a quantum algorithm solving the same problem in time polynomial in the logarithm of the order of the input groups. This algorithm works in the black-box setting and is the first quantum algorithm solving instances of the nonabelian group isomorphism problem exponentially faster than the best known classical algorithms.
We present several new examples of speed-ups obtainable by quantum algorithms in the context of property testing. First, motivated by sampling algorithms, we consider probability distributions given in the form of an oracle
f:[n]→[m]. Here the probability
Pf(j) of an outcome
j in
[m] is the fraction of its domain that
f maps to
j. We give quantum algorithms for testing whether two such distributions are identical or
epsilon-far in
L1-norm. Recently, Bravyi, Hassidim, and Harrow showed that if
Pf and
Pg are both unknown (i.e., given by oracles
f and
g), then this testing can be done in roughly
sqrtm quantum queries to the functions. We consider the case where the second distribution is known, and show that testing can be done with roughly
m1/3 quantum queries, which we prove to be essentially optimal. In contrast, it is known that classical testing algorithms need about
m2/3 queries in the unknown-unknown case and about
sqrtm queries in the known-unknown case. Based on this result, we also reduce the query complexity of graph isomorphism testers with quantum oracle access. While those examples provide polynomial quantum speed-ups, our third example gives a much larger improvement (constant quantum queries vs polynomial classical queries) for the problem of testing periodicity, based on Shor's algorithm and a modification of a classical lower bound by Lachish and Newman. This provides an alternative to a recent constant-vs-polynomial speed-up due to Aaronson.