Property Testing for Cyclic Groups and Beyond

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complexity of property testing for finite groups, establishing new lower bounds and demonstrating the difficulty of testing for cyclic and abelian groups, with implications for classical and quantum query complexities.

Contribution

It provides the first nontrivial lower bounds for group property testing and shows exponential separations between classical and quantum query complexities.

Findings

Omega(|Gamma|^{1/6}) queries needed for cyclic groups

Omega(|Gamma|^c) queries needed for abelian groups generated by k elements

Efficient poly(log|Gamma|) query tester for k=1 when size is known

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of testing if an input (Gamma,*), where Gamma is a finite set of unknown size and * is a binary operation over Gamma given as an oracle, is close to a specified class of groups. Friedl et al. [Efficient testing of groups, STOC'05] have constructed an efficient tester using poly(log|Gamma|) queries for the class of abelian groups. We focus in this paper on subclasses of abelian groups, and show that these problems are much harder: Omega(|Gamma|^{1/6}) queries are necessary to test if the input is close to a cyclic group, and Omega(|Gamma|^c) queries for some constant c are necessary to test more generally if the input is close to an abelian group generated by k elements, for any fixed integer k>0. We also show that knowledge of the size of the ground set Gamma helps only for k=1, in which case we construct an efficient tester using poly(log|Gamma|) queries; for any other value k>1 the query complexity remains Omega(|Gamma|^c). All our upper and lower bounds hold for both the edit distance and the Hamming distance. These are, to the best of our knowledge, the first nontrivial lower bounds for such group-theoretic problems in the property testing model and, in particular, they imply the first exponential separations between the classical and quantum query complexities of testing closeness to classes of groups.