English

Average-Case Quantum Advantage with Shallow Circuits

Quantum Physics 2021-09-27 v4 Computational Complexity

Abstract

Recently Bravyi, Gosset and K\"onig (Science 2018) proved an unconditional separation between the computational powers of small-depth quantum and classical circuits for a relation. In this paper we show a similar separation in the average-case setting that gives stronger evidence of the superiority of small-depth quantum computation: we construct a computational task that can be solved on all inputs by a quantum circuit of constant depth with bounded-fanin gates (a "shallow" quantum circuit) and show that any classical circuit with bounded-fanin gates solving this problem on a non-negligible fraction of the inputs must have logarithmic depth. Our results are obtained by introducing a technique to create quantum states exhibiting global quantum correlations from any graph, via a construction that we call the \emph{extended graph}. Similar results have been very recently (and independently) obtained by Coudron, Stark and Vidick (arXiv:1810.04233), and Bene Watts, Kothari, Schaeffer and Tal (STOC 2019).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.12792,
  title  = {Average-Case Quantum Advantage with Shallow Circuits},
  author = {François Le Gall},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.12792},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

18 pages; accepted to CCC'19; v2: added references, soundness improved (from constant to exponentially small) in the main result; v3: discussion added about the relation with Ref. [BGK18]; v4: corrected typos, footnote 3 removed

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:57:49.789Z