Abstract
Winfree (1998) showed that discrete Sierpinski triangles can self-assemble in the Tile Assembly Model. A striking molecular realization of this self-assembly, using DNA tiles a few nanometers long and verifying the results by atomic-force microscopy, was achieved by Rothemund, Papadakis, and Winfree (2004).
Precisely speaking, the above self-assemblies tile completely filled-in, two-dimensional regions of the plane, with labeled subsets of these tiles representing discrete Sierpinski triangles. This paper addresses the more challenging problem of the strict self-assembly of discrete Sierpinski triangles, i.e., the task of tiling a discrete Sierpinski triangle and nothing else.
We first prove that the standard discrete Sierpinski triangle cannot strictly self-assemble in the Tile Assembly Model. We then define the fibered Sierpinski triangle, a discrete Sierpinski triangle with the same fractal dimension as the standard one but with thin fibers that can carry data, and show that the fibered Sierpinski triangle strictly self-assembles in the Tile Assembly Model. In contrast with the simple XOR algorithm of the earlier, non-strict self-assemblies, our strict self-assembly algorithm makes extensive, recursive use of Winfree counters, coupled with measured delay and corner-turning operations. We verify our strict self-assembly using the local determinism method of Soloveichik and Winfree (2005).
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Lathrop, J.I., Lutz, J.H., Summers, S.M. (2007). Strict Self-assembly of Discrete Sierpinski Triangles. In: Cooper, S.B., Löwe, B., Sorbi, A. (eds) Computation and Logic in the Real World. CiE 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4497. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73001-9_47
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73001-9_47
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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