Reconstructing Strings from Substrings with Quantum Queries

Abstract

This paper investigates the number of quantum queries made to solve the problem of reconstructing an unknown string from its substrings in a certain query model. More concretely, the goal of the problem is to identify an unknown string $S$ by making queries of the following form: "Is $s$ a substring of $S$?", where $s$ is a query string over the given alphabet. The number of queries required to identify the string $S$ is the query complexity of this problem. First we show a quantum algorithm that exactly identifies the string $S$ with at most $3/4N + o(N)$ queries, where $N$ is the length of $S$. This contrasts sharply with the classical query complexity $N$. Our algorithm uses Skiena and Sundaram's classical algorithm and the Grover search as subroutines. To make them effectively work, we develop another subroutine that finds a string appearing only once in $S$, which may have an independent interest. We also prove two lower bounds. The first one is a general lower bound of $Ω(\frac{N}{\log^2{N}})$, which means we cannot achieve a query complexity of $O(N^{1-ε})$ for any constant $ε$. The other one claims that if we cannot use queries of length roughly between $\log N$ and $3 \log N$, then we cannot achieve a query complexity of any sublinear function in $N$.