Short answer: Not with the known proofs, and very likely not. All existing BQP–hardness proofs for the quantum linear systems problem (QLSP/HHL) fundamentally use negative (or complex) matrix elements to encode quantum phases. If you forbid those and insist that every entry of A and of b is in {0,1}, the standard reduction to a generic quantum computation breaks down. Moreover, under natural extra promises that keep the problem well-posed, the resulting linear-systems task lies in much weaker classical complexity classes (indeed in AM, and for large subclasses in BPP), so it would not be BQP-complete unless one believes BQP ⊆ AM.
Here is the landscape in a bit more detail.
What the BQP-hardness proofs use. In Harrow–Hassidim–Lloyd (and subsequent refinements such as Childs–Kothari–Somma), BQP-hardness is obtained by embedding a unitary circuit U into a linear system via a matrix of the form A = I − e−1/T U. The phase structure of U is crucial: negative or complex entries appear and are what enables quantum interference in the reduction. If you require A to have only nonnegative entries (let alone all entries in {0,1}), this construction is impossible. The same is true of Janzing–Wocjan’s matrix powers reduction: at a key point they need a negative matrix element to simulate a controlled-Z.
Why the 0/1 restriction points toward easier (classical) complexity. If you also impose standard well-conditioning/sparsity promises to make the instance meaningful, several large subclasses of 0/1 matrices admit efficient classical algorithms:
Taken together, these observations strongly suggest that, under a “no negative/complex entries” restriction, the induced QLSP is not BQP-hard unless BQP ⊆ AM.
What is actually known. The standard BQP-completeness statements for QLSP assume general sparse Hermitian A with poly-bounded condition number and do not restrict the sign/phase of its entries. Those proofs do not go through if all entries must be nonnegative (and certainly not if they must be in {0,1}). Conversely, there is no published proof that the 0/1-restricted QLSP is BQP-hard; on the contrary, as noted above, with additional natural structural promises it falls in AM or even BPP. If you relax the restriction just slightly to allow signs (entries in {−1,0,1} or, more generally, allowing complex phases through a block-encoding), BQP-hardness comes back via the usual constructions.
About b. Requiring b to have 0/1 entries does not help restore hardness: after normalization, |b⟩ is just a uniform superposition over some subset, which is easy to prepare and does not introduce phases.
Conclusion. The BQP-completeness of HHL/QLSP relies on the ability to encode phases via negative or complex matrix elements. Under a strict {0,1} entry restriction for both A and b, the known BQP-hardness proofs break, and for broad natural subclasses the problem admits AM (and often BPP) algorithms. Thus, unless one believes BQP ⊆ AM, the 0/1-restricted version should not be BQP-complete. As far as is publicly known, proving BQP-hardness under the {0,1} restriction remains open and would require fundamentally new ideas that somehow reintroduce interference without using negative/complex entries.
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version: gpt-5-2025-08-07
Status: UQ Validated
Validated: 7 months ago
Status: Needs Human Verification
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