The Power of Nondeterminism in Self-Assembly

tigate the role of nondeterminism in Winfree's abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM), which was conceived to model artificial molecular self-assembling systems constructed from DNA. Designing tile systems that assemble shapes, due to the algorithmic richness of the aTAM, is a form of sophisticated "molecular programming". Of particular practical importance is to find tile systems that minimize resources such as the number of distinct tile types, each of which corresponds to a set of DNA strands that must be custom-synthesized in actual molecular implementations of the aTAM. We seek to identify to what extent the use of nondeterminism in tile systems affects the resources required by such molecular shape-building algorithms. By nondeterminism we do not mean a magical ability such as that possessed by a nondeterministic algorithm to search an exponential-size space in polynomial time. Rather, we study realistically implementable systems that retain a different sense of dete...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Nathaniel Bryans, Ehsan Chiniforooshan, David Doty, Lila Kari, Shinnosuke Seki
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, Molecular, Tile, Tile Systems