Top boffins who have been looking under the bonnet of Quantum computers are starting to think that they may not be the future of computing. According to Physorg, David Gross at the Institute for Mathematical Physics in Braunschweig, Germany, has just done a paper in which he states that most quantum states are too entangled to be any use as a computer.

Until now the boffins had been thinking that the more entanglement they had, the more powerful quantum computing will be. However he has worked out that there can be such a thing as too much entanglement, rendering the quantum information processing attempt useless.

In a complex explanation, which failed to mention any cats who may or may not be alive, Gross said that entanglement introduces a certain randomness into the system. As this goes up, the computer is about as accurate as me using a slide rule.