XOR Games at Full Tilt: The Hardness of Binary Nonlocal Games
For quantum computing and complexity theory, it establishes a hardness result for a seemingly simple class of nonlocal games, showing that small changes in game rules can lead to undecidability.
The paper shows that approximating the quantum value of tilted XOR games (a variant of XOR games) to constant precision is RE-complete, demonstrating a dramatic increase in computational complexity compared to standard XOR games. This result also implies that binary nonlocal games are RE-hard to approximate.
It is well known that the quantum value of an XOR nonlocal game, where the winning condition depends only on the XOR of the two players' output bits, may be approximated in polynomial time. We study a variant of the XOR game model, which we call tilted XOR games, where the winning condition can additionally depend on only one of the output bits. We show that this dramatically increases the expressive power: the computational complexity of the problem of approximating the quantum value of tilted XOR games to constant precision is RE-complete. Also, our result extends to succinct versions of tilted XOR games, where the questions can be polynomial-length binary strings, generated by a polynomial-time verifier. For classical strategies, the distinction between XOR games and tilted XOR games is inconsequential. Håstad (J. ACM, 2001) shows that they are both NP-complete to approximate, by using a reduction from linear systems to XOR games. Our approach is to show that this is also quantum-sound, but as a reduction from linear system games to tilted XOR games. Since titled XOR games are a special case of binary games (where each party outputs a single bit), our result implies that binary games are RE-hard to approximate.