Improved Results for Competitive Group Testing

We consider algorithms for group testing problems when nothing is known in advance about the number of defectives. Du and Hwang suggested measuring the quality of such algorithms by its so-called (first) competitive ratio (see the Introduction). Later, Du and Park suggested a second kind of competitive ratio. For each kind of competitiveness, we improve the best-known bounds: in the first case, from 1.65 to $1.5+\ep$, and in the second from 16 to 4.