Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
Two procedures for the group-testing problem based on the Shannon-entropy criteria are proposed. The model considered is that the N units are realizations of N Bernoulli independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) chance variables with common, known probability q of an arbitrary unit being good and p =1 – q of it being defective. Both the algorithms introduced have low design complexity and yet provide near-optimal result. For N ≤ 5, one of the procedures introduced is optimal for selected values of q.