Determining defectives in a linear order (Q1085612)

Consider a linearly ordered set L of cardinality n of which exactly d elements are defective. We want to determine the subset D of defective elements by a series of group tests. The possible test sets are all lower and upper intervals and after every test A we receive as answer \(| A\cap D|\), i.e. the exact number of defective elements in A. In this paper the minimum number D(d,n) of group tests necessary to specify D is determined for all d and n.