Project R-7248

Fault tolerance in self-assembly models (Research)

Self-assembly is the spontaneous assembly of simple building blocks into intricate structures, and takes place both in nature and artificially. Because artificial top-down construction is becoming increasingly problematic when operating on smaller scales, self-assembly is fundamental for nanotechnology. In nature, self-assembly appears at virtually all scales: from, e.g., the spontaneous folding of RNA molecules via the development of single cells and multicellular organisms to ant colonies. Self-assembly should be fault tolerant, i.e., obtain a working product even in the face of (modest) errors. It has been demonstrated (both in theory and experimentally) that one can compute by selfassembly. Recently, some mechanisms for fault tolerance has been designed and implemented for computational self-assembly. Unfortunately, every fault-tolerance mechanism comes with a cost. This project will uncover new and improve existing fundamental fault-tolerance mechanisms for computational self-assembly, and will fit them in a unifying framework. Emphasis here is on determining the cost and obtained fault tolerance of combining several fault-tolerance mechanism within a single self-assembly system. This, e.g., allows designers of artificial self-assembly processes to make informed decisions about which fault-tolerance mechanisms to incorporate together in order to derive a reasonable tradeoff between fault tolerance and cost.

01 October 2016 - 30 September 2019