Randomized Self-assembly for Approximate Shapes

In this paper we design tile self-assembly systems which assemble arbitrarily close approximations to target squares with arbitrarily high probability. This is in contrast to previous work which has only considered deterministic assemblies of a single shape. Our technique takes advantage of the ability to assign tile concentrations to each tile type of a self-assembly system. Such an assignment yields a probability distribution over the set of possible assembled shapes. We show that by considering the assembly of close approximations to target shapes with high probability, as opposed to exact deterministic assembly, we are able to achieve significant reductions in tile complexity. In fact, we restrict ourselves to constant sized tile systems, encoding all information about the target shape into the tile concentration assignment. In practice, this offers a potentially useful tradeoff, as large libraries of particles may be infeasible or require substantial effort to create, while the replication of existing particles to adjust relative concentration may be much easier. To illustrate our technique we focus on the assembly of n × n squares, a special case class of shapes whose study has proven fruitful in the development of new self-assembly systems.