Does "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" have quantum origin?

Abstract: Quantum separable operations are defined as those that cannot produce entanglement from separable states, and it is known that they strictly surpass local operations and classical communication (LOCC) in a number of tasks, which is sometimes referred to as "quantum nonlocality without entanglement." Here we consider a task with such a gap regarding the trade-off between state discrimination and preservation of entanglement. We show that this task along with the gap has an analogue in a purely classical setup, indicating that the quantum properties are not essential in the existence of a nonzero gap between the separable operations and LOCC.