Origami Assays Game

The following game uses a small design to illustrate how a pooled assay works. The game is played as follows:
  1. Choose either 1 or 2 numbers between 1 and 13. Write them down.
  2. Select which of the 10 wells contain your number.
  3. The decoder guesses what numbers you have by highlighting them in green . Near matches will be highlighted in gold.

Assay #Samples
5 6 8 13
3 6 7 12
1 6 9 10
4 5 7 11
3 10 11 13
1 2 7 8
8 9 11 12
1 4 12 13
2 4 10
2 3 5 9

Why is this impressive?

While this is a small example, stop to consider what it is doing. You are allowed to pick 0, 1, or 2 positive samples and the design is able to decode these all with just 10 assays. If we count them there are: This means that with just 10 assays we can uniquely identify any one of 86 possible configurations.

What about errors?

This small example also shows what happens if there is an assay failure. Try toggling one well to add in a false positive or false negative. You may find a few interesting outcomes: