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Abstract

This paper reveals a conceptually new connection from information theory to approximation theory via quantum algorithms for entropy estimation. Specifically, we provide an information-theoretic lower bound $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ on the approximate degree of the monomial $x^n$, compared to the analytic lower bounds shown in Newman and Rivlin (Aequ. Math. 1976) via Fourier analysis and in Sachdeva and Vishnoi (Found. Trends Theor. Comput. Sci. 2014) via the Markov brothers' inequality. This is done by relating the polynomial approximation of monomials to quantum Tsallis entropy estimation. This further implies a quantum algorithm that estimates to within additive error $\varepsilon$ the Tsallis entropy of integer order $q \geq 2$ of an unknown probability distribution $p$ or an unknown quantum state $\rho$, using $\widetilde \Theta(\frac{1}{\sqrt{q}\varepsilon})$ queries to the quantum oracle that produces a sample from $p$ or prepares a copy of $\rho$, improving the prior best $O(\frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ via the Shift test due to Ekert, Alves, Oi, Horodecki, Horodecki and Kwek (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2002). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantum entropy estimator with optimal query complexity (up to polylogarithmic factors) for all parameters simultaneously.