MIPco=coRE

Abstract

In 2020, a landmark result by Ji, Natarajan, Vidick, Wright, and Yuen showed that MIP*, the class of languages that can be decided by a classical verifier interacting with multiple computationally unbounded provers sharing entanglement in the tensor product model, is equal to RE. We show that the class MIPco, a complexity class defined similarly to MIP* except with provers sharing the commuting operator model of entanglement, is equal to the class coRE. This shows that giving the provers two different models of entanglement leads to two completely different computational powers for interactive proof systems. Our proof builds upon the compression theorem used in the proof of MIP*=RE, and we use the tracially embeddable strategies framework to show that the same compression procedure in MIP* =RE also has the same desired property in the commuting operator setting. We also give a more streamlined proof of the compression theorem for non-local games by incorporating the synchronous framework used by Mousavi et al. [STOC 2022], as well as the improved Pauli basis test introduced by de la Salle [ArXiv:2204.07084]. We introduce a new equivalence condition for RE/coRE-complete problems, which we call the weakly compressible condition. We show that both MIP* and MIPco satisfy this condition through the compression theorem, and thereby establish that the uncomputability for MIP* and MIPco can be proved under a unified framework (despite these two complexity classes being different). Notably, this approach also gives an alternative proof of the MIP*=RE theorem, which does not rely on the preservation of the entanglement bound. In addition to non-local games, this new condition could also potentially be applicable to other decision problems.