Coordinating Decisions via Quantum Telepathy

Abstract

Quantum telepathy is the phenomenon where two non-communicating parties can exhibit correlated behaviors that are impossible to achieve using classical resources. This is also known as Bell inequality violation and is made possible by quantum entanglement. In this work, we present a conceptual framework for applying quantum telepathy to real-world problems. In general, the problems involve multiple parties making local observations that need to coordinate their decisions but are unable to communicate. We argue this inability is actually quite prevalent in the modern era where the decision-making timescales of computer processors are so short that the speed of light delay is appreciable in comparison. We highlight the example of high-frequency trading (HFT), where trades are made at microsecond timescales, but the speed of light delay between different stock exchanges are on the order of 100 microseconds to 10 milliseconds. Due to the maturity of Bell inequality violation experiments, experimental realization of quantum telepathy schemes that can attain a quantum advantage for real-world problems $\textit{is already almost immediately possible}$. We demonstrate this by conducting a case study for a concrete HFT scenario that gives rise to a generalization of the CHSH game and evaluate different possible physical implementations for achieving a quantum advantage. It is well known that Bell inequality violation is a rigorous mathematical proof of a quantum advantage over any classical strategy and does not need any complexity-theoretic assumptions such as $\text{BQP}\neq\text{BPP}$. Moreover, fault tolerance is not necessary to realize a quantum advantage: for example, violating the CHSH inequality only requires single-qubit operations on two entangled physical qubits.