On non-adaptive majority problems of large query size

Abstract

We are given $n$ balls and an unknown coloring of them with two colors. Our goal is to find a ball that belongs to the larger color class, or show that the color classes have the same size. We can ask sets of $k$ balls as queries, and the problem has different variants, according to what the answers to the queries can be. These questions has attracted several researchers, but the focus of most research was the adaptive version, where queries are decided sequentially, after learning the answer to the previous query. Here we study the non-adaptive version, where all the queries have to be asked at the same time.

Keywords

• mathematics - combinatorics