  In 2004, Klavins et al. introduced the use of graph grammars to describe --
and to program -- systems of self-assembly. It turns out that these graph
grammars are a "dual notion" of a graph rewriting characterization of
distributed systems that was proposed by Degano and Montanari over twenty years
ago. By applying techniques obtained from this observation, we prove a
generalized version of Soloveichik and Winfree's theorem on local determinism,
and we also present a canonical method to simulate asynchronous
constant-size-message-passing models of distributed computing with systems of
self-assembly.
