Testing Boolean Functions Properties

Abstract

The goal in the area of functions property testing is to determine whether a given black-box Boolean function has a particular given property or is ɛ-far from having that property. We investigate here several types of properties testing for Boolean functions (identity, correlations and balancedness) using the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm (for the Deutsch-Jozsa (D-J) problem) and also the amplitude amplification technique. At first, we study here a particular testing problem: namely whether a given Boolean function f, of n variables, is identical with a given function g or is ɛ-far from g, where ɛ is the parameter. We present a one-sided error quantum algorithm to deal with this problem that has the query complexity O(1ε). Moreover, we show that our quantum algorithm is optimal. Afterwards we show that the classical randomized query complexity of this problem is Θ(1ε). Secondly, we consider the D-J problem from the perspective of functional correlations and let C(f, g) denote the correlation of f and g. We propose an exact quantum algorithm for making distinction between |C(f, g)| = ɛ and |C(f, g)| = 1 using six queries, while the classical deterministic query complexity for this problem is Θ(2n) queries. Finally, we propose a one-sided error quantum query algorithm for testing whether one Boolean function is balanced versus ɛ-far balanced using O(1ε) queries. We also prove here that our quantum algorithm for balancedness testing is optimal. At the same time, for this balancedness testing problem we present a classical randomized algorithm with query complexity of O(1/ɛ2). Also this randomized algorithm is optimal. Besides, we link the problems considered here together and generalize them to the general case.