Speaker: Dr Pierre-Étienne Meunier, Maynooth University Department of Computer Science/Hamilton Institute.
Title: "Noncooperative self-assembly".
Abstract: Tile assembly is a distributed computational model used to model crystal growth. Its "non-cooperative" version is the simplest possible form of the model, in that there is no possibility of communication between components other than geometric obstruction.
Even though the definition of this model is extremely simple, the core questions about it have been open for 20 years (and I've been able to convince 13-years-old kids to work on one of them).
In this talk, I'll introduce the general context of molecular computing, this model in particular, some of these questions, and some of our recent answers.
Recommended material for this talk: a pen and paper.