Testing of gemstone based nanomachinery
Of especial interest are methods that do not need any additional structures inside the nano-mechanical system beyond what is already there.
Beyond that simple probing pins are a possibility.
Contents
Range of motion testing
Deliberately moving through the range of motion of degrees of freedom
in order to test whether the constraints in motion match the expected behavior.
Cases that may be encountered:
- Less range of motion than expected (something's blocked – "wrench in the gear" type failure)
- More range of motion than expected (something's broken off inside)
- There is an error but it does not change any rages of motion (thus undetectable via this test)
There may also be complex inter-dependencies between range of motion.
E.g. in the case in non-Cartesian robotic designs with complex work envelope.
In such cases for more in depth testing one could go about theta by Moving along and probing the borders of the expected 2D,3D or even higher dimensional work envelope.
range of motion testing utilities' may or may not be directly and permanently integrated in the nanomachinery.
For more complex testing it might be more suitable to do regular disassembly of the nanomachinery
and test it by reassembling it in a dedicated testing framework.
See: Physical debugging
Indirect testing by analyzing the products
This is about checking if the outputted product meets expectations.
Obviously this works only for productive nanomachinery that produce and expel products.
Additional thoughts
In the end an error that causes some problem X is always per definition at least detectable by that problem X that it causes. Right? – Well unfortunately no.
If there is something inside of some nanomachinery not working as intended but the externally observable behavior is as intended then
it might still be the case that some hidden risk of future failure is massively increased.
Like that: "Wait what?! This connects to that via only a such thin a pin?! What a miracle that it worked till now."
This seems to be a quite nasty failure mode that one might want to be aware of.
Especially nasty if fixing the error leads to a necessary change of a lot of nanomachinery systems sitting atop in abstraction level.
Image based debugging
Optical cameras can't work because of the way too large wavelength of for nanomachinery non ionizing light (soft UV). Even sub-wavelength near field microscopy cant be used. For high resolution surface only images gentle but high resolution matter wave microscopy might be the best bet. But such microscopes will remain inherently macroscopic in size. So there's likely no way to screen all nanomachinery in question but rather a very tiny more or less random sample. See: Physical debugging
