Problem Statement

Identifying the Contaminated Container Problem Description A laboratory stores a batch of containers sealed containers of reagent. Exactly one of them is contaminated; the rest are clean. The lab identifies it using disposable chemical test strips. A test strip is used like this. You may dip a single strip into any subset of the containers you like — a strip may be dipped into many containers at once, and a container may be sampled by many strips at once. Dipping takes no time. A strip that has touched the contaminated reagent turns red exactly minutesPerReading minutes later; a strip that has not touched it never changes colour. While a batch of strips is developing you may not dip any strip, and you read all of the results at once when the minutesPerReading minutes have elapsed. Strips that have already been dipped are spent and cannot be reused, but unused strips remain available for the next round. You have totalMinutes minutes in total. Determine the smallest number of test strips