Complexity of compact proofreading for self-assembled patterns

  • Authors:
  • David Soloveichik;Erik Winfree

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of CNS and CS, California Institute of Technology;Department of CNS and CS, California Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • DNA'05 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on DNA Computing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Fault-tolerance is a critical issue for biochemical computation. Recent theoretical work on algorithmic self-assembly has shown that error correcting tile sets are possible, and that they can achieve exponential decrease in error rates with a small increase in the number of tile types and the scale of the construction [24, 4]. Following [17], we consider the issue of applying similar schemes to achieve error correction without any increase in the scale of the assembled pattern. Using a new proofreading transformation, we show that compact proofreading can be performed for some patterns with a modest increase in the number of tile types. Other patterns appear to require an exponential number of tile types. A simple property of existing proofreading schemes – a strong kind of redundancy – is the culprit, suggesting that if general purpose compact proofreading schemes are to be found, this type of redundancy must be avoided.