Obvious dead ends can be identified and eliminated and more promising designs retained for further investigation. While it can be debated exactly how long it will take to develop a broadly based molecular manufacturing capability, it is clear that the right computational support will substantially reduce the development time. At the other end of the scale, nanometer size mechanical components such as bearings, gears, levers, and so forth built from diamondoid material will be extremely stiff, a property of crucial importance in molecular scale robotic arms that must maintain high positional accuracy in the face of thermal noise. In the long run, many manufactured products will be made from diamondoid materials. Core capabilities are already in place, and future extensions are planned.
Crystals are regular structures.
Crystal Clear has powerful crystal lattice operators which leverage this fact. Natural and intuitive operations can be performed over all atoms which are part of a user-selected subset of a diamond lattice. That basis may include, for example, every third atom in one direction, every fourth atom in a second direction, and every atom in a third direction. Then using a handle box the user can stretch the basis into a selection lattice of the desired width, height, and length. One use of this capability is to select atoms for deletion, another is to select two groups of atoms in order to bond corresponding atoms to each other.