In this problem your goal is to identify who among a group o

In this problem, your goal is to identify who among

a group of people has a certain disease. You collect a blood sample from

each of the people in the group, and label them 1 through n. Suppose that

you know in advance that exactly one person is infected with the disease,

and you must identify who that person is by performing blood tests. In

a single blood test, you can specify any subset of the samples, combine a

drop of blood from each of these samples, and then get a result. If any

sample in the subset is infected, the test will come up positive, otherwise

it will come up negative. Your goal is to ?nd the infected person with as

few blood tests as possible

Solution

if You collect a blood sample from each of the people in the group.and label them 1 through n.then you are applying the survey method. from which you can come to know exactly how many are infected and who are those. But it is time consuming and waste of blood.

We can use cluster sampling by divinding the entire group in k subsets and we can survey all the persons in the sample. by using this method you can arrive to the decision sooner than doing the survey. If that infected person is found in the first kth subset then you dont have to proceed further.