A little bit of classical magic to achieve quantum speedup

Abstract

We introduce nebit, a classical bit with a signed probability distribution. We quantify its entropy using Szekely theorem on signed probability measures and show that classical stochastic dynamics supplemented with nebits can achieve or even exceed the speedup of Grover's quantum search algorithm. The proposed classical dynamics never reveals negativity of nebits and thus we do not need any operational interpretation of negative probabilities. We argue that nebits can be useful as a measure of non-classicality as well as a tool to find new quantum algorithms.