  The Tile Assembly Model is a Turing universal model that Winfree introduced
in order to study the nanoscale self-assembly of complex (typically aperiodic)
DNA crystals. Winfree exhibited a self-assembly that tiles the first quadrant
of the Cartesian plane with specially labeled tiles appearing at exactly the
positions of points in the Sierpinski triangle. More recently, Lathrop, Lutz,
and Summers proved that the Sierpinski triangle cannot self-assemble in the
"strict" sense in which tiles are not allowed to appear at positions outside
the target structure. Here we investigate the strict self-assembly of sets that
approximate the Sierpinski triangle. We show that every set that does strictly
self-assemble disagrees with the Sierpinski triangle on a set with fractal
dimension at least that of the Sierpinski triangle (roughly 1.585), and that no
subset of the Sierpinski triangle with fractal dimension greater than 1
strictly self-assembles. We show that our bounds are tight, even when
restricted to supersets of the Sierpinski triangle, by presenting a strict
self-assembly that adds communication fibers to the fractal structure without
disturbing it. To verify this strict self-assembly we develop a generalization
of the local determinism method of Soloveichik and Winfree.
