Communication complexity of promise problems and their applications to finite automata

Equality and disjointness are two of the most studied problems in communication complexity. They have been studied for both classical and also quantum communication and for various models and modes of communication. Buhrman et al. [Buh98] proved that the exact quantum communication complexity for a promise version of the equality problem is ${\bf O}(\log {n})$ while the classical deterministic communication complexity is $n+1$ for two-way communication, which was the first impressively large (exponential) gap between quantum and classical (deterministic and probabilistic) communication complexity. If an error is tolerated, both quantum and probabilistic communication complexities for equality are ${\bf O}(\log {n})$. However, even if an error is tolerated, the gaps between quantum (probabilistic) and deterministic complexity are not larger than quadratic for the disjointness problem. It is therefore interesting to ask whether there are some promise versions of the disjointness problem for which bigger gaps can be shown. We give a positive answer to such a question. Namely, we prove that there exists an exponential gap between quantum (even probabilistic) communication complexity and classical deterministic communication complexity of some specific versions of the disjointness problem. Klauck [Kla00] proved, for any language, that the state complexity of exact quantum/classical finite automata, which is a general model of one-way quantum finite automata, is not less than the state complexity of an equivalent one-way deterministic finite automata (1DFA). In this paper we show, using a communication complexity result, that situation may be different for some promise problems. Namely, we show for certain promise problem that the gap between the state complexity of exact one-way quantum finite automata and 1DFA can be exponential.