Searching with Lies

Letft(n) be the number of questions necessary to find an unknown element out of a set ofnelements with aq-ary search process when up totanswers may be wrong (are lies). Forq=2, this problem was treated by several authors. We give the complete solution fort=1 and derive bounds for generalt. Further, it is shown that the corresponding functiong1(n) for the non-adaptive case (which requires construction of 1-error correcting codes) differs fromf1(n) by at most 1, whenqis a prime power.