Group Testing with Pools of Fixed Size

Abstract

In the classical combinatorial (adaptive) group testing problem, one is given two integers $d$ and $n$, where $0\le d\le n$, and a population of $n$ items, exactly $d$ of which are known to be defective. The question is to devise an optimal sequential algorithm that, at each step, tests a subset of the population and determines whether such subset is contaminated (i.e. contains defective items) or otherwise. The problem is solved only when the $d$ defective items are identified. The minimum number of steps that an optimal sequential algorithm takes in general (i.e. in the worst case) to solve the problem is denoted by $M(d, n)$. The computation of $M(d, n)$ appears to be very difficult and a general formula is known only for $d = 1$. We consider here a variant of the original problem, where the size of the subsets to be tested is restricted to be a fixed positive integer $k$. The corresponding minimum number of tests by a sequential optimal algorithm is denoted by $M^{\lbrack k\rbrack}(d, n)$. In this paper we start the investigation of the function $M^{\lbrack k\rbrack}(d, n)$