Adversary Lower Bound for Element Distinctness with Small Range

The Element Distinctness problem is to decide whether each character of an input string is unique. The quantum query complexity of Element Distinctness is known to be $Θ(N^{2/3})$; the polynomial method gives a tight lower bound for any input alphabet, while a tight adversary construction was only known for alphabets of size $Ω(N^2)$. We construct a tight $Ω(N^{2/3})$ adversary lower bound for Element Distinctness with minimal non-trivial alphabet size, which equals the length of the input. This result may help to improve lower bounds for other related query problems.

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