On the Power of Quantum Computation

The quantum model of computation is a model, analogous to the probabilistic Turing machine (PTM), in which the normal laws of chance are replaced by those obeyed by particles on a quantum mechanical scale, rather than the rules familiar to us from the macroscopic world. We present here a problem of distinguishing between two fairly natural classes of functions, which can provably be solved exponentially faster in the quantum model than in the classical probabilistic one, when the function is given as an oracle drawn equiprobably from the uniform distribution on either class. We thus offer compelling evidence that the quantum model may have significantly more complexity theoretic power than the PTM. In fact, drawing on this work, Shor has recently developed remarkable new quantum polynomial-time algorithms for the discrete logarithm and integer factoring problems.