2014/04/29 by Andrew Winslow, Winslow, Andrew
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced biosensing and bioanalysis techniques #Computational Geometry (cs.CG) #DNA and Biological Computing #Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence #cs.CG #cs.ET
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1404.7410
arxiv created 2014/04/29 · openalex publication_date 2014/04/29 · arxiv updated 2014/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce a new property of tile self-assembly systems that we call size-separability. A system is size-separable if every terminal assembly is a constant factor larger than any intermediate assembly. Size-separability is motivated by the practical problem of filtering completed assemblies from a variety of incomplete "garbage" assemblies using gel electrophoresis or other mass-based filtering techniques. Here we prove that any system without cooperative bonding assembling a unique mismatch-free terminal assembly can be used to construct a size-separable system uniquely assembling the same shape. The proof achieves optimal scale factor and temperature for the size-separable system. As part of the proof, we obtain two results of independent interest on mismatch-free temperature-1 two-handed systems.