Understanding the role that quantum entanglement plays as a resource in various information processing tasks is one of the crucial goals of quantum information theory. Here we propose an alternative perspective for studying quantum entanglement: distributed computation of functions without communication between nodes. To formalize this approach, we propose identity games. Surprisingly, despite no signaling, we obtain that nonlocal quantum strategies beat classical ones in terms of winning probability for identity games originating from certain bipartite and multipartite functions. Moreover we show that, for a majority of functions, access to general nonsignaling resources boosts success probability two times in comparison to classical ones for a number of large enough outputs. Because there are no constraints on the inputs and no processing of the outputs in the identity games, they detect very strong types of correlations: absolute nonlocality.

• Received 25 November 2014
• Revised 20 April 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.92.032122