Theory Seminar, 5/7

From: David Kempe (kempe@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Thu May 06 2004 - 18:14:37 PDT

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    Dear theory lovers,

    come one, come all, for the second installment of "An Introduction to
    Self-Assembly". We will cover such exciting things as error reduction
    and correction for, and space and time complexity of, tile systems.

    The abstract for last week's talk is re-appended below.

    Title: An Introduction to Combinatorial Self-Assembly, Part 2
    Time: Friday, 5/7, 11:30am-12:20pm
    Place: EE1-045 (or wherever it usually is - darn those numbers!)
    Guide: David Kempe

    >Abstract:
    >Self-assembly is the process by which small simple objects (called
    >"tiles"), exposed to the right physical conditions, assemble into a
    >larger, complex, and desirable aggregate object. It has been suggested
    >that self-assembly may become an important technology for circuit
    >design and nano-fabrication. For instance, a memory chip consists of
    >many identical gates arranged in regular patterns, and one could
    >imagine designing identical gates in such a way that billions of them
    >will arrange into a working memory chip (with the help of a few more
    >other gates, of course).
    >
    >On the experimental side, there has recently been progress on
    >self-assembling larger objects from DNA-based tiles. Along with the
    >experimental progress, the theory of self-assembly is now receiving
    >more attention, including questions such as:
    >- What are good mathematical models, and how do choices in those
    >models affect the computational complexity of problems?
    >- How powerful is self-assembly as a computational model?
    >- How many different types of tiles or glue between them are needed to
    >assemble the object I want?
    >- How long will the assembly process take?
    >- How to deal with the inevitable errors that happen in practice, and
    >how to reduce the number of errors?
    >
    >Thus, questions from self-assembly combine theory of computation,
    >complexity, algorithmic questions, and coding in an interesting way.
    >In this two-talk overview series, I plan to give a taste of the
    >models, questions, and known results.
    >
    >

    -- 
    David Kempe <kempe@cs.washington.edu>
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  • Next message: Kelli McGee \(Kelly Services Inc\): "5/24/2004 Asymptotic Enumeration of Spanning Trees via Traces and Random Walks; Russell Lyons, Indiana University"

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