Quantum Color-Coding Is Better

Abstract

We describe a quantum scheme to ``color-code'' a set of objects in order to record which one is which. In the classical case, N distinct colors are required to color-code N objects. We show that in the quantum case, only N/e distinct ``colors'' are required, where e = 2.71828 . . . If the number of colors is less than optimal, the objects may still be correctly distinguished with some success probability less than 1. We show that the success probability of the quantum scheme is better than the corresponding classical one and is information-theoretically optimal.