No Arabic abstract
We prove that by successively combining subassemblies, we can achieve sublinear construction times for staged assembly of micro-scale objects from a large number of tiny particles, for vast classes of shapes; this is a significant advance in the context of programmable matter and self-assembly for building high-yield micro-factories.The underlying model has particles moving under the influence of uniform external forces until they hit an obstacle; particles bond when forced together with a compatible particle. Previous work considered sequential composition of objects, resulting in construction time that is linear in the number N of particles, which is inefficient for large N. Our progress implies critical speedup for constructible shapes; for convex polyominoes, even a constant construction time is possible. We also show that our construction process can be used for pipelining, resulting in an amortized constant production time.
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is constructible. Previous work provides a class of shapes for which constructibility can be decided efficiently, when particles move maximally into the same direction on actuation. In this paper, we consider a stronger model. On actuation, each particle moves one unit step into the given direction. We prove that deciding constructibility is NP-hard for three-dimensional shapes, and that a maximum constructible shape can be approximated. The same approximation algorithm applies for 2D. We further present linear-time algorithms to decide whether a tree-shape in 2D or 3D is constructible. If scaling is allowed, we show that the $c$-scaled copy of every non-degenerate polyomino is constructible, for every $c geq 2$.
This short survey of recent work in tile self-assembly discusses the use of simulation to classify and separate the computational and expressive power of self-assembly models. The journey begins with the result that there is a single universal tile set that, with proper initialization and scaling, simulates any tile assembly system. This universal tile set exhibits something stronger than Turing universality: it captures the geometry and dynamics of any simulated system. From there we find that there is no such tile set in the noncooperative, or temperature 1, model, proving it weaker than the full tile assembly model. In the two-handed or hierarchal model, where large assemblies can bind together on one step, we encounter an infinite set, of infinite hierarchies, each with strictly increasing simulation power. Towards the end of our trip, we find one tile to rule them all: a single rotatable flipable polygonal tile that can simulate any tile assembly system. It seems this could be the beginning of a much longer journey, so directions for future work are suggested.
We study stability of multivariable control-affine nonlinear systems under sparsification of feedback controllers. Sparsification in our context refers to the scheduling of the individual control inputs one at a time in rapid periodic sweeps over the set of control inputs, which corresponds to round-robin scheduling. We prove that if a locally asymptotically stabilizing feedback controller is sparsified via the round-robin scheme and each control action is scaled appropriately, then the corresponding equilibrium of the resulting system is stabilized when the scheduling is sufficiently fast; under mild additional conditions, local asymptotic stabilization of the corresponding equilibrium can also be guaranteed. Moreover, the basin of attraction for the equilibrium of scheduled system also remains same as the original system under sufficiently fast switching. Our technical tools are derived from optimal control theory, and our results also contribute to the literature on the stability of switched systems in the fast switching regime. Illustrative numerical examples depicting several subtle features of our results are included.
Recent studies of dynamic self-assembly in ferromagnetic colloids suspended in liquid-air or liquid-liquid interfaces revealed a rich variety of dynamic structures ranging from linear snakes to axisymmetric asters, which exhibit novel morphology of the magnetic ordering accompanied by large-scale hydrodynamic flows. Based on controlled experiments and first principle theory, we argue that the transition from snakes to asters is governed by the viscosity of the suspending liquid where less viscous liquids favor snakes and more viscous, asters. By obtaining analytic solutions of the time-averaged Navier-Stokes equations, we gain insights into the role of mean hydrodynamic flows and an overall balance of forces governing the self-assembly. Our results illustrate that the viscosity can be used to control the outcome of the dynamic self-assembly in magnetic colloidal suspensions.
Lattices are an efficient and effective method to encode ambiguity of upstream systems in natural language processing tasks, for example to compactly capture multiple speech recognition hypotheses, or to represent multiple linguistic analyses. Previous work has extended recurrent neural networks to model lattice inputs and achieved improvements in various tasks, but these models suffer from very slow computation speeds. This paper extends the recently proposed paradigm of self-attention to handle lattice inputs. Self-attention is a sequence modeling technique that relates inputs to one another by computing pairwise similarities and has gained popularity for both its strong results and its computational efficiency. To extend such models to handle lattices, we introduce probabilistic reachability masks that incorporate lattice structure into the model and support lattice scores if available. We also propose a method for adapting positional embeddings to lattice structures. We apply the proposed model to a speech translation task and find that it outperforms all examined baselines while being much faster to compute than previous neural lattice models during both training and inference.