Simple information-processing tasks with unbounded quantum advantage

Abstract

Communication scenarios between two parties can be implemented by first encoding messages into some states of a physical system which acts as the physical medium of the communication and then decoding the messages by measuring the state of the system. We show that already in the simplest possible scenarios it is possible to detect a definite, unbounded advantage of quantum systems over classical systems. We do this by constructing a family of operationally meaningful communication tasks, each of which, on the one hand, can be implemented by using just a single qubit but which, on the other hand, require an unboundedly larger classical system for classical implementation. Furthermore, we show that even though, with the additional resource of shared randomness, the proposed communication tasks can be implemented by both quantum and classical systems of the same size, the number of coordinated actions needed for the classical implementation also grows unboundedly. In particular, no finite storage can be used to store all the coordinated actions required to implement all possible quantum communication tasks with classical systems. As a consequence, shared randomness cannot be viewed as a free resource.