Lower Bounds on the Running Time of Two-Way Quantum Finite Automata and Sublogarithmic-Space Quantum Turing Machines Zachary Remscrim Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago, IL, USA
[email protected] Abstract The two-way finite automaton with quantum and classical states (2QCFA), defined by Ambainis and Watrous, is a model of quantum computation whose quantum part is extremely limited; however, as they showed, 2QCFA are surprisingly powerful: a 2QCFA with only a single-qubit can recognize the ∗ O(n) language Lpal = {w ∈ {a, b} : w is a palindrome} with bounded error in expected time 2 . We prove that their result cannot be improved upon: a 2QCFA (of any size) cannot recognize o(n) Lpal with bounded error in expected time 2 . This is the first example of a language that can be recognized with bounded error by a 2QCFA in exponential time but not in subexponential time. Moreover, we prove that a quantum Turing machine (QTM) running in space o(log n) and expected n1−Ω(1) time 2 cannot recognize Lpal with bounded error; again, this is the first lower bound of its kind. Far more generally, we establish a lower bound on the running time of any 2QCFA or o(log n)-space QTM that recognizes any language L in terms of a natural “hardness measure” of L. This allows us to exhibit a large family of languages for which we have asymptotically matching lower and upper bounds on the running time of any such 2QCFA or QTM recognizer. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory; Theory of computation → Quantum computation theory Keywords and phrases Quantum computation, Lower bounds, Finite automata Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.39 Related Version Full version of the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.09877.