The foundation of experimental design and observation

Summary Despite a very large literature on experimental design there are few papers which discuss the fundamentals, certainly compared to work on statistical inference. This paper tries to address some of the issues in a way which draws together some different fields such as search, group-testing and entropy based methods. An important philosophical distinction is between active and passive observation and examples introduce this subject. There are close connections with the approach tof Taguchi in engineering. This paper, the following discussion, the contribution of R. Fontana and the reply of H. P. Wynn are a result of the seminar hold in Rome, on the 6th October 1993. The Editorial Board wishes to thank Prof. Alessandra Giovagnoli for the organization of the meeting.