## Closing the gap between quantum and deterministic query complexity for easy to certify total functions

Recently, trying to keep with my weekly post schedule, I’ve been a bit strapped for inspiration. As such, I’ve posted a few times on a major topic from my past life: quantum query complexity. I’ve mostly tried to describe some techniques for (lower) bounding query complexity like the negative adversary method and span programs. But I’ve never really showed how to use these methods to actually set up interesting bounds.

Since I am again short of a post, I thought I’d share this week a simple proof of a bound possible with these techniques. This is based on an old note I wrote on 19 April 2011.

One of the big conjectures in quantum query complexity — at least a half decade ago when I was worrying about this topic — is that quantum queries give you at most a quadratic speedup over deterministic queries for total functions. In symbols: $D(f) = O(Q^2(f))$. Since Grover’s algorithm can give us a quadratic quantum speed-up for arbitrary total functions, this conjecture basically says: you can’t do better than Grover.

In this post, I’ll prove a baby version of this conjecture.

Let’s call a Boolean total-function easy to certify if one side of the function has a constant-length certificate complexity. I’ll prove that for easy-to-certify total functions, $D(f) = O(Q^2(f))$.

This is not an important result, but I thought it is a cute illustration of standard techniques. And so it doesn’t get lost in my old pdf, I thought I’d finally convert it to a blog post. Think of this as a simple application of the adversary method.