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Science | DOI:10.1145/3290407 Don Monroe

Quantum Leap
A new proof supports a 25-year-old claim
of the unique power of quantum computing.

H
OPES FOR QUANTUM comput-
ing have long been buoyed by
the existence of algorithms
that would solve some par-
ticularly challenging prob-
lems with exponentially fewer opera-
tions than any known algorithm for
conventional computers. Many experts
believe, but have been unable to prove,
that these problems will resist even the
cleverest non-quantum algorithms.
Recently, researchers have shown the
strongest evidence yet that even if con-
ventional computers were made much
more powerful, they probably still could
not efficiently solve some problems that
a quantum computer could.

IMAGE BY AND RIJ BORYS ASSOCIAT ES, BASED ON GRAP HIC F ROM UNIVERSIT Y OF STRAT HCLYD E
That such problems exist is a long-
standing conjecture about the greater
capability of quantum computers.
“It was really the first big conjecture
in quantum complexity theory,” said
computer scientist Umesh Vazirani
of the University of California, Berke-
ley, who proposed the conjecture with
then-student Ethan Bernstein in the
1993 paper (updated in 1997) that es-
tablished the field.
That work, now further validated, al model, then or now, “that violates Quantum Resources
challenged the cherished thesis that the extended Church-Turing thesis,” Conventional “classical” computers
any general computer can simulate any Vazirani said. “It overturned this basic store information as bits than can be
other efficiently, since quantum com- fabric of computer science, and said: in one of two states, denoted 0 and 1.
puters will sometimes be out of reach ‘here’s a new kid on the block, and it’s In contrast, a quantum degree of free-
of conventional emulation. Quantum completely different and able to do to- dom, such as the spin of an electron or
computation is the only computation- tally different things.’” the polarization of a photon, can exist

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concurrently in a weighted mixture of
two states. A set of, say, 50 of these “qu-
bits” thus can represent all 250 (~1015)
combinations of the individual states.
Manipulations of this assembly can be
viewed as simultaneously performing a
quadrillion calculations.
Performing a vast number of com-
putations does not do much good,
however, unless a unique answer can
be extracted. Interrogating the qubits
forces them into some specific combi-
nation of 0s and 1s, with probabilities
that depend on their post-calculation
weights. Critically, however, different
initial configurations make quantum
contributions to the weight that are
complex numbers, which can cancel
each other out as well as reinforce each
other. The challenge is devising an al-
gorithm for which this cancellation
occurs for all configurations except
the desired solution, so the eventual
measurement reveals this answer.
Soon after Bernstein and Vazira-
ni’s work, mathematician Peter Shor,
working at AT&T Research in New
Jersey as it spun off from Bell Labs,
presented an algorithm that achieved
this goal for determining the fac-
tors of a large integer. The security
of public key cryptography schemes
depends on this factorization being
impractically time consuming, so the
potential for a rapid quantum solu-
tion attracted a lot of attention.
Inspired by this and other concrete
examples, researchers have been striv-
ing to assemble ever-larger systems of
physical qubits in the lab that can pre-
serve the delicate complex amplitudes
of the qubits long enough to perform
a calculation, and to correct the in-
evitable errors. In recent years, several
competing implementations have got-
ten big enough (dozens of qubits) to
achieve “quantum supremacy,” mean-
ing solving selected problems faster
than a conventional computer.
Classifying Complexity
Assessing comparative execution
times is complicated by the fact that
algorithms continually improve,
sometimes dramatically. To compare
techniques that have yet to be devised
and machines that have yet to be built,
computer scientists rely not on cod-
ing but on formal methods known as
computational complexity theory.
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These mathematical arguments can
determine if an answer can be assured ACM
given access to specific resources, such
as computational time or the depth of
a corresponding circuit. An algorithm
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that is guaranteed to finish in “poly-
nomial time,” meaning the runtime
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increases no faster than some fixed PRESERVING HISTORY
power of the size of the input, can be IN A DIGITAL LIBRARY
regarded as efficient. In contrast, many Edward A. Fox,
problems, notably those that require a professor
of computer
exhaustively searching many combina- science at
torial possibilities, are only known to Virginia
yield to methods whose execution time Polytechnic
Institute and
grows exponentially or worse with the State University (Virginia Tech),
size of the input. recalls joining ACM more than
Complexity theory divides problems 50 years ago.
into “complexity classes,” depending Fox first became a member
of ACM in 1967, while
on the resources they need. Some of an undergraduate at the
the best-known problems belong to the Massachusetts Institute
class P, consisting of problems whose of Technology (MIT). During
his first year as a member,
solution can be found in polynomial he launched MIT’s ACM
time. A much larger class is NP, which Student Chapter.
includes problems for which a pro- In 2017, Fox was named
posed solution can be verified as cor- an ACM Fellow, cited for his
contributions to information
rect in polynomial time. NP includes retrieval and digital libraries,
such classic challenges as the traveling the latter a field he helped to
salesman problem and the graph ver- launch. “A lot of people don’t
tex coloring problem, which research- know what a digital library is,”
Fox says, “So a way to think
ers have been unable to show belong to of it is as an information
P. Many experts strongly suspect that system tailored to a community
polynomial-time algorithms for many of people.”
Fox has served in numerous
problems in NP have not been found positions and capacities within
because they do not exist, in which case ACM over the years. He is
P≠NP. This important question, re- currently co-chair (with Michael
garded by many as the most important Nelson) of the ACM Publications
Board’s Digital Library and
open question in theoretical computer Technology Committee, which
science, remains unresolved, and a works closely with the technical
$1-million prize from the Clay Math- and publishing staff to review
services offered by ACM in
ematics Institute awaits its answer. the context of competing and
complementary primary and
secondary online resources.
To compare He first became interested
in computer science in the mid-
techniques that have 1960s when, as a junior in high
school, he attended a computer
yet to be devised course during a study program
at Columbia University. He
and machines that went on to earn his bachelor’s
degree in electrical engineering
have yet to be built, from MIT, and both his master’s
and Ph.D. degrees in computer
computer scientists science from Cornell University.
In the future, Fox hopes the
rely on computational technologies of information
retrieval, digital libraries, and
complexity theory. archiving will be even better
integrated, as a means of
helping to preserve our history
and achievements for the future.
—John Delaney
JA N UA RY 2 0 1 9 | VO L. 6 2 | N O. 1 | C OM M U N IC AT ION S OF T HE ACM 11
news
Bernstein and Vazirani defined
a new complexity class called BQP
(Bounded Quantum Polynomial), which
has access to quantum resources. BQP
is closely analogous to the conventional
class BPP (Bounded Probabilistic Poly-
nomial), which has access to a perfect
random-number generator and must
not give a wrong answer too often. Cur-
rently, some problems having only
stochastic solutions are known, but it
is hoped that deterministic, “de-ran-
domized” algorithms will eventually be
found for them.
Consulting the Oracle tum computations, and Shor’s algo-
The relationship of the quantum class
BQP to various conventional classes,
however, continues to be studied, long
after Bernstein and Vazirani suggested
it includes problems beyond the scope
of conventional techniques. “We have
our conjectures and we can feel strongly
about them, but every so often they are
wrong,” Vazirani said. “A proof is really
something to be celebrated.”
The new proof of separation does
not apply to the pure versions of BQP
and the other complexity classes ad-
dressed by the Vazirani-Bernstein con-
jecture. Similar to the long-standing
unproven relationship of P and NP,
“We almost never are able to actually
separate these important classes of
complexity theory,” said computer sci-
entist Ran Raz of Princeton University
in New Jersey and the Weizmann Insti-
tute in Israel. “We don’t know how.”
Instead, Raz and his former stu-
dent Avishay Tal (now at Stanford
University) performed what is called
an oracle separation. Like its name-
sake from ancient Greece (or The Ma-
trix movies), an oracle provides an-
swers to profound questions without
explaining how it got them. Roughly
speaking, Raz and Tal compared the
capabilities of quantum and classi-
cal algorithms that were given access
to an oracle that answers a specific
question. Provided with this oracle,
they showed the quantum system
could efficiently solve a carefully
chosen problem more efficiently
than the classical system could using
the same oracle.
Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist
at the Georgia Institute of Technology,
said hundreds of proofs in complex-
ity theory have relied upon such oracle
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“The basic ability
to do Fourier
transformation,
that’s the heart
of the power
of quantum,
at least most
of the algorithms
we know.”
separations. “They are a way for us to
understand what kinds of problems
are hard to prove and what kinds of re-
sults might be possible, but they’re not
a definite proof technique,” he said.
“We didn’t prove a separation between
these two classes,” Raz agreed. “I can’t
imagine that [such a separation] will
be proved in our lifetime.”
“Already there were oracle separa-
tions of BQP and NP, BQP and P, and
other classes,” Raz said. He and Tal
now extend the argument to a super-
charged class called the polynomial hi-
erarchy, or PH. “This is what is stronger
in our result,” he said. PH can be viewed
as an infinite ladder of classes, start-
ing with P and NP, in which successive
rungs can build on the earlier ones by
using logical constructions. Later class-
es invoke the earlier ones rather like a
subroutine, for example by defining
problems using them in a phrase such
as “for every,” or “there exists.” “Almost
all the problems that we encounter in
everyday life are somewhere in the poly-
nomial hierarchy,” Raz said.
If all NP problems had polynomial-
time solutions, though, it turns out that
the entire polynomial hierarchy would
collapse into one class, PH=NP=P. The
new result, though, shows that oracle-
assisted BQP would still be separate.
“The way I view the Raz-Tal oracle is
they’re saying that even if P happened
to equal to NP—that’s an unlikely
case,” Fortnow said, “it’s still possible
that quantum can do more than classi-
cal machines can.”
What Is It Good For?
“If we choose the right oracle,” Raz said,
“we show that there is one problem that
BQP will solve better than PH.” In addi-
tion to choosing the right oracle, he and
Tal had to choose a problem that reveals
quantum computation’s strength—and
classical computation’s weakness—but
they only needed one example.
They adapted an earlier suggestion
by Scott Aaronson (then at the Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology)
in which the computer must deter-
mine if one sequence of bits is (ap-
proximately) the Fourier transform of
another. Computing such frequency
spectra is a natural task for quan-
rithm exploits precisely this strength
to identify periodicities that expose
prime factors of the target. “The basic
ability to do Fourier transformation,”
Fortnow said, “that’s the heart of the
power of quantum, at least most of
the algorithms we know.”
“The hard part is to give the lower
bound for the polynomial hierarchy,”
Raz said. To show that no such algo-
rithm, even with access to the oracle,
could solve it efficiently, he and Tal
tweaked Aaronson’s suggestion so they
could apply recent discoveries about
pseudorandom sequences.
These and the earlier results illus-
trate what quantum computers will be
able to do, once they get very large and
perform like the idealized models, Vazi-
rani said. What is less clear is how to ef-
fectively use the less-capable machines
that are now being developed. “What
will we be able to do with those?” he
asked. “That’s one of the things that we
are working hard to try to figure out.”
Further Reading
Bernstein, E. and Vazirani, E.
Quantum Complexity Theory, SIAM J.
Comput. 26, 1411 (1997).
Shor, P.W.
Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime
Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on
a Quantum Computer, SIAM Journal of
Computing 26, pp. 1484–1509 (1997).
Raz, R. and Tal, A.
Oracle Separation of BQP and PH, Electronic
Colloquium on Computational Complexity,
Report No. 107 (2018).
Don Monroe is a science and technology writer based in
Boston, MA, USA.
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