We assess the resources needed to identify a reversible quantum gate among a finite set of alternatives, including in our analysis both deterministic and probabilistic strategies. Among the probabilistic strategies, we consider unambiguous gate discrimination-where errors are not tolerated but inconclusive outcomes are allowed-and we prove that parallel strategies are sufficient to unambiguously identify the unknown gate with minimum number of queries. This result is used to provide upper and lower bounds on the query complexity and on the minimum ancilla dimension. In addition, we introduce the notion of generalized t-designs, which includes unitary t-designs and group representations as special cases. For gates forming a generalized t-design we give an explicit expression for the maximum probability of correct gate identification and we prove that there is no gap between the performances of deterministic strategies and those of probabilistic strategies. Hence, evaluating of the query complexity of perfect deterministic discrimination is reduced to the easier problem of evaluating the query complexity of unambiguous 4 Identifying an unknown unitary evolution, available as a black box, is a fundamental problem in quantum theory [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], with a wide range of applications in quantum information and computation. In quantum computation, the problem is known as oracle identification [10][11][12][13][14] and is the core of paradigmatic quantum algorithms such as Grover's [15] and . In quantum information processing, the identification of an unknown unitary gate plays a key role in the stabilizer formalism of quantum error correction [17,18] and in its generalization to unitary error bases [19][20][21][22][23], in the security analysis of quantum cryptographic protocols that encode secret data into unitary gates [24][25][26][27][28][29], New Journal of Physics 15 (2013) 103019 (http://www.njp.org/)