Gottesman-Knill Limit on One-way Communication Complexity: Tracing the Quantum Advantage down to Magic

Abstract: A recent influential result by Frenkel and Weiner establishes that in presence of shared randomness (SR), any input-output correlation, with a classical input provided to one party and a classical output produced by a distant party, achievable with a d-dimensional quantum system can always be reproduced by a d-dimensional classical system. In contrast, quantum systems are known to offer advantages in communication complexity tasks, which consider an additional input variable to the second party. Here, we show that, in presence of SR, any one-way communication complexity protocol implemented using a prime-dimensional quantum system can always be simulated exactly by communicating a classical system of the same dimension, whenever quantum protocols are restricted to stabilizer state preparations and stabilizer measurements. In direct analogy with the Gottesman-Knill theorem in quantum computation, which attributes quantum advantage to non-stabilizer (or magic) resources, our result identifies the same resources as essential for realizing quantum advantage in one-way communication complexity. We further present explicit tasks where `minimal magic' suffices to offer a provable quantum advantage, underscoring the efficient use of such resources in communication complexity.