Experimental quantum advantage with quantum coupon collector

An increasing number of communication and computational schemes with quantum advantages have recently been proposed, which implies that quantum technology has fertile application prospects. However, demonstrating these schemes experimentally continues to be a central challenge because of the difficulty in preparing high-dimensional states or highly entangled states. In this study, we introduce and analyse a quantum coupon collector protocol by employing coherent states and simple linear optical elements, which was successfully demonstrated using realistic experimental equipment. We showed that our protocol can significantly reduce the number of samples needed to learn a specific set compared with the classical limit of the coupon collector problem. We also discuss the potential values and expansions of the quantum coupon collector by constructing a quantum blind box game. The information transmitted by the proposed game also broke the classical limit. These results strongly prove the advantages of quantum mechanics in machine learning and communication complexity.