English

A note on deterministic zombies

Combinatorics 2021-06-04 v3 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

"Zombies and Survivor" is a variant of the well-studied game of "Cops and Robber" where the zombies (cops) can only move closer to the survivor (robber). We consider the deterministic version of the game where a zombie can choose their path if multiple options are available. The zombie number, like the cop number, of a graph is the minimum number of zombies, or cops, required to capture the survivor. In this short note, we solve a question by Fitzpatrick et al., proving that the zombie number of the Cartesian product of two graphs is at most the sum of their zombie numbers. We also give a simple graph family with cop number 22 and an arbitrarily large zombie number.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.03587,
  title  = {A note on deterministic zombies},
  author = {Valentin Bartier and Laurine Bénéteau and Marthe Bonamy and Hoang La and Jonathan Narboni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03587},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

4 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:43:30.640Z