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Symmetry is a unifying concept in physics. In quantum information and beyond, it is known that quantum states possessing symmetry are not useful for certain information-processing tasks. For example, states that commute with a Hamiltonian realizing a time evolution are not useful for timekeeping during that evolution, and bipartite states that are highly extendible are not strongly entangled and thus not useful for basic tasks like teleportation. Motivated by this perspective, this paper details several quantum algorithms that test the symmetry of quantum states and channels. For the case of testing Bose symmetry of a state, we show that there is a simple and efficient quantum algorithm, while the tests for other kinds of symmetry rely on the aid of a quantum prover. We prove that the acceptance probability of each algorithm is equal to the maximum symmetric fidelity of the state being tested, thus giving a firm operational meaning to these latter resource quantifiers. Special cases of the algorithms test for incoherence or separability of quantum states. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms on choice examples by using the variational approach to quantum algorithms, replacing the quantum prover with a parameterized circuit. We demonstrate this approach for numerous examples using the IBM quantum noiseless and noisy simulators, and we observe that the algorithms perform well in the noiseless case and exhibit noise resilience in the noisy case. We also show that the maximum symmetric fidelities can be calculated by semi-definite programs, which is useful for benchmarking the performance of these algorithms for sufficiently small examples. Finally, we establish various generalizations of the resource theory of asymmetry, with the upshot being that the acceptance probabilities of the algorithms are resource monotones and thus well motivated from the resource-theoretic perspective. 

The mixedness of one share of a pure bipartite state determines whether the overall state is a separable, unentangled one. Here we consider quantum computational tests of mixedness, and we derive an exact expression of the acceptance probability of such tests as the number of copies of the state becomes larger. We prove that the analytical form of this expression is given by the cycle index polynomial of the symmetric group S k , which is itself related to the Bell polynomials. After doing so, we derive a family of quantum separability tests, each of which is generated by a finite group; for all such algorithms, we show that the acceptance probability is determined by the cycle index polynomial of the group. Finally, we produce and analyse explicit circuit constructions for these tests, showing that the tests corresponding to the symmetric and cyclic groups can be executed with O ( k 2 ) and O ( k log ⁡ ( k ) ) controlled-SWAP gates, respectively, where k is the number of copies of the state being tested.