Algorithms and lower bounds for entangled XOR games
In this talk I will consider the complexity of the problem of determining, given a nonlocal XOR game with k = 3 players, whether there exists an entangled strategy for the game using commuting operators that succeeds with probability 1. Our first result is a polynomial-time algorithm to solve this problem for any k; previously, this problem was not known to be decidable, and indeed, it was shown recently by Slofstra that the same question for a different class of games is undecidable. Our second result is a characterization of random symmetric XOR games: we show that there exists a constant C_k depending only on k, such that a random symmetric k-player XOR game with question alphabet size n has no perfect entangled strategy with high probability when the number of clauses is above C_k *n. Moreover, for random (not necessarily symmetric) games in the regime where no perfect entangled strategy exists, we show a lower bound on the number of levels in the NPA (Navascues-Pironio-Acin) hierarchy of semidefinite programs needed to witness this fact. Joint work with Adam Bene Watts and Aram Harrow (both at MIT).