Robust Quantum Algorithms for Oracle Identification

Abstract

The oracle identification problem (OIP) was introduced by Ambainis et al. \cite{AIKMRY04}. It is given as a set $S$ of $M$ oracles and a blackbox oracle $f$. Our task is to figure out which oracle in $S$ is equal to the blackbox $f$ by making queries to $f$. OIP includes several problems such as the Grover Search as special cases. In this paper, we improve the algorithms in \cite{AIKMRY04} by providing a mostly optimal upper bound of query complexity for this problem: ($i$) For any oracle set $S$ such that $|S| \le 2^{N^d}$ ($d < 1$), we design an algorithm whose query complexity is $O(\sqrt{N\log{M}/\log{N}})$, matching the lower bound proved in \cite{AIKMRY04}. ($ii$) Our algorithm also works for the range between $2^{N^d}$ and $2^{N/\log{N}}$ (where the bound becomes O(N)), but the gap between the upper and lower bounds worsens gradually. ($iii$) Our algorithm is robust, namely, it exhibits the same performance (up to a constant factor) against the noisy oracles as also shown in the literatures \cite{AC02,BNRW03,HMW03} for special cases of OIP.