A critical view of the evolutionary design of self-assembling systems

The automated design of systems which self-assemble is a fundamental cornerstone of nanotechnology. In this paper we review some work in which we have applied Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for the automated design of systems self-assembly. We will focus in three important minimalist self-assembly problems and we discuss the difficulties encountered while applying EAs to these test cases. We also suggest some promising lines of work that could possibly help overcome current limitations in the evolutionary design of self-assembling systems