English

Lower bounds on the Deterministic and Quantum Communication Complexity of Hamming Distance

Computational Complexity 2015-01-13 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Alice and Bob want to know if two strings of length n are almost equal. That is, do they differ on \textit{at most} a bits? Let 0\leq a\leq n-1. We show that any deterministic protocol, as well as any error-free quantum protocol (C* version), for this problem requires at least n-2 bits of communication. We show the same bounds for the problem of determining if two strings differ in exactly a bits. We also prove a lower bound of n/2-1 for error-free Q* quantum protocols. Our results are obtained by lower-bounding the ranks of the appropriate matrices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0411076,
  title  = {Lower bounds on the Deterministic and Quantum Communication Complexity of Hamming Distance},
  author = {Andris Ambainis and William Gasarch and Aravind Srinavasan and Andrey Utis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0411076},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, this version to appear in ACM Transactions on Computation Theory

R2 v1 2026-07-22T12:22:47.470Z