3-Color Bounded Patterned Self-assembly - (Extended Abstract)

Patterned self-assembly tile set synthesis (Pats) is the problem of finding a minimal tile set which uniquely self-assembles into a given pattern. Czeizler and Popa proved the NP-completeness of Pats and Seki showed that the Pats problem is already NP-complete for patterns with 60 colors. In search for the minimal number of colors such that Pats remains NP-complete, we introduce multiple bound Pats (mbPats) where we allow bounds for the numbers of tile types of each color. We show that mbPats is NP-complete for patterns with just three colors and, as a byproduct of this result, we also obtain a novel proof for the NP-completeness of Pats which is more concise than the previous proofs.