Efficient Squares and Turing Universality at Temperature 1 with a Unique   Negative Glue
  Is Winfree's abstract Tile Assembly Model (aTAM) "powerful?" Well, if certain tiles are required to "cooperate" in order to be able to bind to a growing tile assembly (a.k.a., temperature 2 self-assembly), then Turing universal computation and the efficient self-assembly of $N \times N$ squares is achievable in the aTAM (Rotemund and Winfree, STOC 2000). So yes, in a computational sense, the aTAM is quite powerful! However, if one completely removes this cooperativity condition (a.k.a., temperature 1 self-assembly), then the computational "power" of the aTAM (i.e., its ability to support Turing universal computation and the efficient self-assembly of $N \times N$ squares) becomes unknown. On the plus side, the aTAM, at temperature 1, isn't only Turing universal but also supports the efficient self-assembly $N \times N$ squares if self-assembly is allowed to utilize three spatial dimensions (Fu, Schweller and Cook, SODA 2011). We investigate the theoretical "power" of a seemingly simple, restrictive class of tile assembly systems (TASs) in which (1) the absolute value of every glue strength is 1, (2) there's a single negative strength glue type and (3) unequal glues can't interact. We call these the \emph{restricted glue} TASs (rgTAS). We first show the tile complexity of producing an $N \times N$ square with an rgTAS is $O(\frac{\log n}{\log \log n})$. We also prove that rgTASs are Turing universal with a construction that simulates an arbitrary Turing machine. Next, we provide results for a variation of the rgTAS class, partially restricted glue TASs, which is similar except that the magnitude of the negative glue's strength can only assumed to be $\ge 1$. These results consist of a construction with $O(\log n)$ tile complexity for building $N \times N$ squares, and one which simulates a Turing machine but with a greater scaling factor than for the rgTAS construction. 
Matthew J. Patitz and Robert T. Schweller and Scott M. Summers
cs.ET cs.CG