The Influence of Shape on Parallel Self-Assembly

Entropy

Shuhei Miyashita¹  Zoltán Nagy¹  Bradley J. Nelson¹ 

[1] ¹Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland ²Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, ETH Zurich, Tannenstrasse 3, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

关键词: self-assembly;    degree of parallelism;    morphology;    distributed system;   

DOI  :  10.3390/e11040643

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Self-assembly is a key phenomenon whereby vast numbers of individual components passively interact and form organized structures, as can be seen, for example, in the morphogenesis of a virus. Generally speaking, the process can be viewed as a spatial placement of attractive and repulsive components. In this paper, we report on an investigation of how morphology, i.e., the shape of components, affects a self-assembly process. The experiments were conducted with 3 differently shaped floating tiles equipped with magnets in an agitated water tank. We propose a novel measure involving clustering coefficients, which qualifies the degree of parallelism of the assembly process. The results showed that the assembly processes were affected by the aggregation sequence in their early stages, where shape induces different behaviors and thus results in variations in aggregation speeds.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.