  We discuss temporal efficiency of template-directed polymer synthesis, such
as DNA replication and transcription, under a given template string. To weigh
the synthesis speed and accuracy on the same scale, we propose a
template-directed synthesis (TDS) rate, which contains an expression analogous
to that for the Shannon entropy. Increasing the synthesis speed accelerates the
TDS rate, but the TDS rate is lowered if the produced sequences are
diversified. We apply the TDS rate to some production system models and
investigate how the balance between the speed and the accuracy is affected by
changes in the system conditions.
