Abstract
The use of combinatorial objects, called designs, originates from statistical applications. Let us assume that we wish to compare v varieties of wines. In order to make the testing procedure as fair as possible it is natural to require that:
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(a)
each participating person tastes the same number (say k) of varieties so that each person’s opinion has the same weight;
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(b)
each pair of varieties is compared by the same number (say λ) of persons so that each variety gets the same treatment.
One possibility would be to let everyone taste all the varieties. But if v is large, this is very impractical (if not dangerous, as in the case of wines), and the comparisons become rather unreliable. Thus, we should try to design the experiment so that k<v.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Jukna, S. (2011). Designs. In: Extremal Combinatorics. Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17364-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17364-6_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17363-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17364-6
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