Group testing

Abstract

During the covid-19 pandemic, the capacity of test facilities and ways to increase it were often discussed. One of the methods that was actually implemented in practice was pooling. This is a method where multiple samples are mixed and tested at the same time. In practice, pooling was used so that the test took place in two steps. In the first step, small groups of samples were tested (according to the Ministry of health recommendations of 6–10 samples). If a group was positive, each sample in that group was tested separately in the second step. In this article, we will present methods of group testing (Combinatorial group testing), which stands on the border between mathematics and computer science and which allow directly in the first step of the test to detect specific infected samples. The presented algorithms are available to high school students and mainly use the properties of writing numbers in a system with a different basis.