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Simon's problem for linear functions

Quantum Physics 2019-01-04 v2 Computational Complexity Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

Simon's problem asks the following: determine if a function f:{0,1}n{0,1}nf: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n is one-to-one or if there exists a unique s{0,1}ns \in \{0,1\}^n such that f(x)=f(xs)f(x) = f(x \oplus s) for all x{0,1}nx \in \{0,1\}^n, given the promise that exactly one of the two holds. A classical algorithm that can solve this problem for every ff requires 2Ω(n)2^{\Omega(n)} queries to ff. Simon showed that there is a quantum algorithm that can solve this promise problem for every ff using only O(n)\mathcal O(n) quantum queries to ff. A matching lower bound on the number of quantum queries was given by Koiran et al., even for functions f:FpnFpnf: {\mathbb{F}_p^n} \to {\mathbb{F}_p^n}. We give a short proof that O(n)\mathcal O(n) quantum queries is optimal even when we are additionally promised that ff is linear. This is somewhat surprising because for linear functions there even exists a classical nn-query algorithm.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.12030,
  title  = {Simon's problem for linear functions},
  author = {Joran van Apeldoorn and Sander Gribling},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.12030},
  year   = {2019}
}

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7 pages