Quantum leader election

Abstract

A group of n individuals A1, … An who do not trust each other and are located far away from each other, want to select a leader. This is the leader election problem, a natural extension of the coin flipping problem to n players. We want a protocol which will guarantee that an honest player will have at least 1n-ϵ chance of winning (∀ ϵ> 0), regardless of what the other players do (whether they are honest, cheating alone or in groups). It is known to be impossible classically. This work gives a simple algorithm that does it, based on the weak coin flipping protocol with arbitrarily small bias derived by Mochon (Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias, arXiv:0711.4114, 2000) in 2007, and recently published and simplified in Aharonov et al. (SIAM J Comput, 2016). A protocol with linear number of coin flipping rounds is quite simple to achieve; we further provide an improvement to logarithmic number of coin flipping rounds. This is a much improved journal version of a preprint posted in 2009; the first protocol with linear number of rounds was achieved independently also by Aharon and Silman (New J Phys 12:033027, 2010) around the same time.