REDUCED ENTANGLEMENT FOR QUANTUM GAMES

Abstract

Quantum generalizations of conventional games exploit entangled states to improve performance. With many players, quantum games can require entangling many states. Such entanglement is difficult to implement, especially if the states must be communicated over some distance. To simplify possible implementations, we examine some quantum versions of social dilemma games and show their use of entanglement can be substantially reduced by randomly replacing some of the entangled states by unentangled ones. For the example of public goods games, we identify a unique Nash equilibrium invariant with respect to the amount of this replacement. We also show players obtain no advantage from adding more entanglement to states which they control. With many players, a fairly small number of entangled states can give nearly as good performance as using the full number of such states.