No Arabic abstract
The CHSH no-signalling game studies Bell nonlocality by showcasing a gap between the win rates of classical strategies, quantum-entangled strategies, and no-signalling strategies. Similarly, the CHSH* single-system game explores the advantage of irreversible processes by showcasing a gap between the win rates of classical reversible strategies, quantum reversible strategies, and irreversible strategies. The irreversible process of erasure rules supreme for the CHSH* single-system game, but this ``erasure advantage does not necessarily extend to every single-system game: We introduce the 32-Game, in which reversibility is irrelevant and only the distinction between classical and quantum operations matters. We showcase our new insight by modifying the CHSH* game to make it erasure-immune, while conserving its quantum advantage. We conclude by the reverse procedure: We tune the 32-Game to make it erasure-vulnerable, and erase its quantum advantage in the process. The take-home message is that, when the size of the single-system is too small for Alice to encode her whole input, quantum advantage and erasure advantage can happen independently.
Reversible simulation of irreversible algorithms is analyzed in the stylized form of a `reversible pebble game. While such simulations incur little overhead in additional computation time, they use a large amount of additional memory space during the computation. The reacheable reversible simulation instantaneous descriptions (pebble configurations) are characterized completely. As a corollary we obtain the reversible simulation by Bennett and that among all simulations that can be modelled by the pebble game, Bennetts simulation is optimal in that it uses the least auxiliary space for the greatest number of simulated steps. One can reduce the auxiliary storage overhead incurred by the reversible simulation at the cost of allowing limited erasing leading to an irreversibility-space tradeoff. We show that in this resource-bounded setting the limited erasing needs to be performed at precise instants during the simulation. We show that the reversible simulation can be modified so that it is applicable also when the simulated computation time is unknown.
In (single-server) Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a server holds a large database $DB$ of size $n$, and a client holds an index $i in [n]$ and wishes to retrieve $DB[i]$ without revealing $i$ to the server. It is well known that information theoretic privacy even against an `honest but curious server requires $Omega(n)$ communication complexity. This is true even if quantum communication is allowed and is due to the ability of such an adversarial server to execute the protocol on a superposition of databases instead of on a specific database (`input purification attack). Nevertheless, there have been some proposals of protocols that achieve sub-linear communication and appear to provide some notion of privacy. Most notably, a protocol due to Le Gall (ToC 2012) with communication complexity $O(sqrt{n})$, and a protocol by Kerenidis et al. (QIC 2016) with communication complexity $O(log(n))$, and $O(n)$ shared entanglement. We show that, in a sense, input purification is the only potent adversarial strategy, and protocols such as the two protocols above are secure in a restricted variant of the quantum honest but curious (a.k.a specious) model. More explicitly, we propose a restricted privacy notion called emph{anchored privacy}, where the adversary is forced to execute on a classical database (i.e. the execution is anchored to a classical database). We show that for measurement-free protocols, anchored security against honest adversarial servers implies anchored privacy even against specious adversaries. Finally, we prove that even with (unlimited) pre-shared entanglement it is impossible to achieve security in the standard specious model with sub-linear communication, thus further substantiating the necessity of our relaxation. This lower bound may be of independent interest (in particular recalling that PIR is a special case of Fully Homomorphic Encryption).
We study dynamical reversibility in stationary stochastic processes from an information theoretic perspective. Extending earlier work on the reversibility of Markov chains, we focus on finitary processes with arbitrarily long conditional correlations. In particular, we examine stationary processes represented or generated by edge-emitting, finite-state hidden Markov models. Surprisingly, we find pervasive temporal asymmetries in the statistics of such stationary processes with the consequence that the computational resources necessary to generate a process in the forward and reverse temporal directions are generally not the same. In fact, an exhaustive survey indicates that most stationary processes are irreversible. We study the ensuing relations between model topology in different representations, the processs statistical properties, and its reversibility in detail. A processs temporal asymmetry is efficiently captured using two canonical unifilar representations of the generating model, the forward-time and reverse-time epsilon-machines. We analyze example irreversible processes whose epsilon-machine presentations change size under time reversal, including one which has a finite number of recurrent causal states in one direction, but an infinite number in the opposite. From the forward-time and reverse-time epsilon-machines, we are able to construct a symmetrized, but nonunifilar, generator of a process---the bidirectional machine. Using the bidirectional machine, we show how to directly calculate a processs fundamental information properties, many of which are otherwise only poorly approximated via process samples. The tools we introduce and the insights we offer provide a better understanding of the many facets of reversibility and irreversibility in stochastic processes.
We discuss the realization of quantum advantage in a system without quantum entanglement but with non-zero quantum discord. We propose an optical realization of symmetric two-qubit $X$-states with controllable anti-diagonal elements. This approach does not requires initially entangled states, and it can generate states that have quantum discord, with or without entanglement. We discuss how quantum advantage can be attained in the context of a two-qubit game. We show that when entanglement is not present, the maximum quantum advantage is 1/3 bit. A comparable quantum advantage, 0.311 bit, can be realized with a simplified transaction protocol involving one vs. the three unitary operations needed for the maximum advantage.
Quantum resources outperform classical ones for certain communication and computational tasks. Remarkably, in some cases, the quantum advantage cannot be improved using hypothetical postquantum resources. A class of tasks with this property can be singled out using graph theory. Here we report the experimental observation of an impossible-to-beat quantum advantage on a four-dimensional quantum system defined by the polarization and orbital angular momentum of a single photon. The results show pristine evidence of the quantum advantage and are compatible with the maximum advantage allowed using postquantum resources.