Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 67 2 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
Boolean conjunction is multiplication on zero-one inputs. The block conjunction of three-bit majorities therefore has the multilinear polynomialThe factors use disjoint variables, so their product remains a multilinear polynomial. Its monomial containing all variables has coefficient ; no term has higher degree. By uniqueness, the representing multilinear polynomial has degree exactly . Applying the polynomial method for quantum query lower bounds givesThis argument concerns exact quantum query complexity; the analogous claim for bounded error does not follow from exact polynomial degree.