Hierarchical self-assembly for high-yield addressable complexity at fixed conditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is evidence that the self-assembly of complex molecular systems often proceeds hierarchically, by first building subunits that later assemble in larger entities, in a process that can repeat multiple times. Yet, our understanding of this phenomenon and its performance is limited. Here, we introduce a simple model for hierarchical addressable self-assembly, where interactions between particles can be optimized to maximize the fraction of a well-formed target structure, or yield. We find that a hierarchical strategy leads to an impressive yield up to at least five generations of the hierarchy and does not require a cycle of temperatures as used in previous methods. High yield is obtained when the microscopic interaction decreases with the scale of units considered, such that the total interaction between intermediate structures remains identical at all scales. We provide thermodynamic and dynamical arguments constraining the interaction strengths where this strategy is effective. Overall, our work characterizes an alternative strategy for addressable self-assembly at a fixed temperature, and provides insight into the mechanisms sustaining hierarchical assembly in biological systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".