Interaction in Quantum Communication Complexity

One of the most intriguing facts about communication using quantum states is that these states cannot be used to transmit more classical bits than the number of qubits used, yet there are ways of conveying information with exponentially fewer qubits than possible classically [2, 21]. Moreover, these methods have a very simple structure—they involve little interaction between the communicating parties. We look more closely at the ways in which information encoded in quantum states may be manipulated, and consider the question as to whether every classical protocol may be transformed to a “simpler” quantum protocol of similar efficiency. By a simpler protocol, we mean a protocol that uses fewer message exchanges. We show that for any constant k, there is a problem such that its k+1 message classical communication complexity is exponentially smaller than its k message quantum communication complexity, thus answering the above question in the negative. Our result builds on two primitives, local transitions in bi-partite states (based on previous work) and average encoding which may be of significance in other applications as well.