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Related papers: Cops and robbers in random graphs

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Mohar recently adapted the classical game of Cops and Robber from graphs to metric spaces, thereby unifying previously studied pursuit-evasion games. He conjectured that finitely many cops can win on any compact geodesic metric space, and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-09-08 Agelos Georgakopoulos

We introduce and study the Generalized Cops and Robbers game (GCR), an N-player pursuit game in graphs. The two-player version is essentially equivalent to the classic Cops and Robbers (CR) game. The three-player version can be understood…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Athanasios Kehagias

The deduction game is a variation of the game of cops and robber on graphs in which searchers must capture an invisible evader in at most one move. Searchers know each others' initial locations, but can only communicate if they are on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-24 Andrea Burgess , Danny Dyer , Mozhgan Farahani

Meyniel's conjecture is one of the deepest open problems on the cop number of a graph. It states that for a connected graph $G$ of order $n,$ $c(G) = O(\sqrt{n}).$ While largely ignored for over 20 years, the conjecture is receiving…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-16 William Baird , Anthony Bonato

We study the m-Eternal Domination problem, which is the following two-player game between a defender and an attacker on a graph: initially, the defender positions k guards on vertices of the graph; the game then proceeds in turns between…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Tiziana Calamoneri , Federico Corò , Neeldhara Misra , Saraswati G. Nanoti , Giacomo Paesani

We consider a Cops-and-Robber game played on the subsets of an $n$-set. The robber starts at the full set; the cops start at the empty set. On each turn, the robber moves down one level by discarding an element, and each cop moves up one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-02-24 William B. Kinnersley , Paweł Prałat , Douglas B. West

In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined. In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-06-03 Dan Hefetz , Michael Krivelevich , Miloš Stojaković , Tibor Szabó

In the Localization game played on graphs, a set of cops uses distance probes to identify the location of an invisible robber. We present an extension of the game and its main parameter, the localization number, to directed graphs. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-08-17 Anthony Bonato , Ryan Cushman , Trent G. Marbach , Brittany Pittman

This paper is a contribution to the classical cops and robber problem on a graph, directed to two-dimensional grids and toroidal grids. These studies are generally aimed at determining the minimum number of cops needed to capture the robber…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-01-24 Fabrizio Luccio , Linda Pagli

In this paper, we consider a variant of the cops and robbers game on a graph, introduced by Kinnersley and Peterson, in which every time the robber uses an edge, it is removed from the graph, known as bridge-burning cops and robbers. In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-21 Rebekah Herrman , Peter van Hintum , Stephen G. Z. Smith

We study the localization number of incidence graphs of designs. In the localization game played on a graph, the cops attempt to determine the location of an invisible robber via distance probes. The localization number of a graph $G$,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-05-27 Anthony Bonato , Melissa A. Huggan , Trent Marbach

The game of Cops and Robbers on graphs is a well-studied pursuit--evasion model whose central parameter, the cop number, captures the minimum number of pursuers required to guarantee capture of an adversary on a given graph. While the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Nicholas Crawford , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

The cop throttling number $th_c(G)$ of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers is the minimum of $k + capt_k(G)$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $capt_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds needed for $k$ cops to capture the robber…

We study the problem of cops and robbers on the grid where the robber is allowed to move faster than the cops. It is well known that two cops are necessary and sufficient to catch the robber on any finite grid when the robber has unit…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-06-06 Paul Balister , Béla Bollobás , Bhargav Narayanan , Amy Shaw

The recently introduced variation of the game of cops and robber is played on geodesic spaces. In this paper we establish some general strategies for the players, in particular the generalized radial strategy and the covering space…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2022-11-07 Vesna Iršič , Bojan Mohar , Alexandra Wesolek

We consider a class of pursuit-evasion problems where an evader enters a directed acyclic graph and attempts to reach one of the terminal nodes. A pursuer enters the graph at a later time and attempts to capture the evader before it reaches…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-09-14 Shreyas Sundaram , Krishnamoorthy Kalyanam , David W. Casbeer

We consider biased $(1:b)$ Avoider-Enforcer games in the monotone and strict versions. In particular, we show that Avoider can keep his graph being a forest for every but maybe the last round of the game if $b \geq 200 n \ln n$. By this we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-12 Dennis Clemens , Julia Ehrenmüller , Yury Person , Tuan Tran

We investigate the computational complexity of deciding whether k cops can capture a robber on a graph G. In 1995, Goldstein and Reingold conjectured that the problem is EXPTIME-complete when both G and k are part of the input; we prove…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-12-05 William B. Kinnersley

We study a game on a graph $G$ played by $r$ {\it revolutionaries} and $s$ {\it spies}. Initially, revolutionaries and then spies occupy vertices. In each subsequent round, each revolutionary may move to a neighboring vertex or not move,…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-08-06 Jane V. Butterfield , Daniel W. Cranston , Gregory J. Puleo , Douglas B. West , Reza Zamani

We study a variation of the cops and robber game characterising treewidth, where in each play at most q cops can be placed in order to catch the robber, where q is a parameter of the game. We prove that if k cops have a winning strategy in…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Isolde Adler , Eva Fluck