Complexity of Self-Assembled Shapes

• Authors: David Soloveichik;Erik Winfree
• Venue: SIAM Journal on Computing
• Year: 2007

The connection between self-assembly and computation suggests that a shape can be considered the output of a self-assembly “program,” a set of tiles that fit together to create a shape. It seems plausible that the size of the smallest self-assembly program that builds a shape and the shape’s descriptional (Kolmogorov) complexity should be related. We show that when using a notion of a shape that is independent of scale, this is indeed so: in the tile assembly model, the minimal number of distinct tile types necessary to self-assemble a shape, at some scale, can be bounded both above and below in terms of the shape’s Kolmogorov complexity. As part of the proof, we develop a universal constructor for this model of self-assembly that can execute an arbitrary Turing machine program specifying how to grow a shape. Our result implies, somewhat counterintuitively, that self-assembly of a scaled-up version of a shape often requires fewer tile types. Furthermore, the independence of scale in self-assembly theory appears to play the same crucial role as the independence of running time in the theory of computability. This leads to an elegant formulation of languages of shapes generated by self-assembly. Considering functions from bit strings to shapes, we show that the running-time complexity, with respect to Turing machines, is polynomially equivalent to the scale complexity of the same function implemented via self-assembly by a finite set of tile types. Our results also hold for shapes defined by Wang tiling—where there is no sense of a self-assembly process—except that here time complexity must be measured with respect to nondeterministic Turing machines.