English

A note on the relation between Hartnell's firefighter problem and growth of groups

Group Theory 2017-01-13 v2 Combinatorics Geometric Topology

Abstract

The firefighter game problem on locally finite connected graphs was introduced by Bert Hartnell. The game on a graph GG can be described as follows: let fnf_n be a sequence of positive integers; an initial fire starts at a finite set of vertices; at each (integer) time n1n\geq 1, fnf_n vertices which are not on fire become protected, and then the fire spreads to all unprotected neighbors of vertices on fire; once a vertex is protected or is on fire, it remains so for all time intervals. The graph GG has the \emph{fnf_n-containment property} if every initial fire admits an strategy that protects fnf_n vertices at time nn so that the set of vertices on fire is eventually constant. If the graph GG has the containment property for a sequence of the form fn=Cndf_n=Cn^d, then the graph is said to have \emph{polynomial containment}. In [5], it is shown that any locally finite graph with polynomial growth has polynomial containment; and it is remarked that the converse does not hold. That article also raised the question of whether the equivalence of polynomial growth and polynomial containment holds for Cayley graphs of finitely generated groups. In this short note, we remark how the equivalence holds for elementary amenable groups and for non-amenable groups from results in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1701.02614,
  title  = {A note on the relation between Hartnell's firefighter problem and growth of groups},
  author = {Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.02614},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

To appear in Actes du S\'eminaire de Th\'eorie Spectrale et G\'eometrie. Univ. Grenoble I, Saint-Martin-d'H\`eres