Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:
Erik D. Demaine, Sarah Eisenstat, Mashhood Ishaque, and Andrew Winslow, “One-Dimensional Staged Self-Assembly”, Natural Computing, volume 12, number 2, 2013, pages 247–258.

Abstract:
We introduce the problem of staged self-assembly of one-dimensional nanostructures, which becomes interesting when the elements are labeled (e.g., representing functional units that must be placed at specific locations). In a restricted model in which each operation has a single terminal assembly, we prove that assembling a given string of labels with the fewest steps is equivalent, up to constant factors, to compressing the string to be uniquely derived from the smallest possible context-free grammar (a well-studied O(log n)-approximable problem) and that the problem is NP-hard. Without this restriction, we show that the optimal assembly can be substantially smaller than the optimal context-free grammar, by a factor of Ω(√n/log n) even for binary strings of length n. Fortunately, we can bound this separation in model power by a quadratic function in the number of distinct glues or tiles allowed in the assembly, which is typically small in practice.

Comments:
This paper is also available from SpringerLink.

Length:
The paper is 20 pages.

Availability:
The paper is available in PostScript (6743k), gzipped PostScript (640k), and PDF (591k).
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Related papers:
Staged1D_DNA2011 (One-Dimensional Staged Self-Assembly)


See also other papers by Erik Demaine.
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Last updated March 12, 2024 by Erik Demaine.