In an interactive proof, a questioner asks a series of questions, each of which constrains the range of possible answers to the next question. The questioner doesn’t have the power to compute valid answers itself, but it does have the power to determine whether each new answer meets the constraints imposed by the previous ones. After enough questions, the questioner will either expose a contradiction or reduce the probability that the respondent is cheating to near zero.
Multiprover proofs are so much more efficient than single-respondent proofs because none of the respondents knows the constraints imposed by the others’ answers. Consequently, contradictions are much more likely if any respondent tries to cheat.
But if the respondents have access to particles that are entangled with each other — say, electrons that were orbiting the same atom but were subsequently separated — they can perform measurements — of, say, the spins of select electrons — that will enable them to coordinate their answers. That’s enough to thwart some interactive proofs.
The proof that Vidick and Ito analyzed is designed to make cheating difficult by disguising the questioner’s intent. To get a sense of how it works, imagine a graph that in some sense plots questions against answers, and suppose that the questioner is interested in two answers, which would be depicted on the graph as two points. Instead of asking the two questions of interest, however, the questioner asks at least three different questions. If the answers to those questions fall on a single line, then so do the answers that the questioner really cares about, which can now be calculated. If the answers don’t fall on a line, then at least one of the respondents is trying to cheat.
“That’s basically the idea, except that you do it in a much more high-dimensional way,” Vidick says. “Instead of having two dimensions, you have ‘N’ dimensions, and you think of all the questions and answers as being a small, N-dimensional cube.”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/interactive-proofs-work-even-if-quantum-information-is-used-0731.html
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