Quantum versus classical simultaneity in communication complexity

Abstract: This work addresses two problems in the context of two-party communication complexity of functions. First, it concludes the line of research, which can be viewed as demonstrating qualitative advantage of quantum communication in the three most common communication "layouts": two-way interactive communication; one-way communication; simultaneous message passing (SMP). We demonstrate a functional problem, whose communication complexity is $O((\log n)^2)$ in the quantum version of SMP and $\tilde\Omega(\sqrt n)$ in the classical (randomised) version of SMP. Second, this work contributes to understanding the power of the weakest commonly studied regime of quantum communication $-$ SMP with quantum messages and without shared randomness (the latter restriction can be viewed as a somewhat artificial way of making the quantum model "as weak as possible"). Our function has an efficient solution in this regime as well, which means that even lacking shared randomness, quantum SMP can be exponentially stronger than its classical counterpart with shared randomness.