The surface-based approach for DNA computation is unreliable for SAT

Previous research presented DNA computing on surfaces, which applied to each clause three operations:“mark”,“destroy”, and “unmark”, and demonstrated how to solve a four-variable four-clause instance of the 3-SAT. It was claimed that only the strands satisfying the problem remained on the surface at the end of the computation and the surface-based approach was capable of scaling up to larger 3-SAT problems. Accordingly, the identities of the strands were only determined in the“readout” step for the correct solutions to the problem without checking if the strands really satisfied the problem. Thus, based on the claim above, the surface-based approach became a polynomial-time algorithm. In this paper, we show that for some instance of SAT, at the end of the computation all the remaining strands falsify the instance. However, by the previous claim all the strands falsifying the problems would be regarded as the correct solutions to the problems. Therefore, the DNA computing on surfaces is unreliable. For this reason, it is necessary to add a “verify” step after the “readout” step to check if the strands remaining on the surface at the end of the computation really satisfy the problem.