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The game of Cops and Robber is a pursuit-evasion game which is usually played on a connected graph. In the game, a set of cops and a robber move around the vertices of a graph along edges, where the cops aim to capture the robber, while the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-07-27 Pinkaew Siriwong , Ratinan Boonklurb , Henry Liu , Sirirat Singhun

The game of cops and robber is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs that has been extensively studied. Traditionally the game is played with one or more cops and only one robber, but in this paper we consider the game played with…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-15 Miha Gyergyek , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

The 'Cheating Robot' version of Cops and Robbers is played on a finite, simple, connected graph. The players move in the same time period. However, before moving, the robot observes to which vertices the cops are moving and it is fast…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-12 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski

In the game of cops and robber, the cops try to capture a robber moving on the vertices of the graph. The minimum number of cops required to win on a given graph $G$ is called the cop number of $G$. The biggest open conjecture in this area…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-09-25 Pawel Pralat , Nicholas Wormald

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, studied by Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-08-12 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

We consider the well-studied cops and robbers game in the context of oriented graphs, which has received surprisingly little attention to date. We examine the relationship between the cop numbers of an oriented graph and its underlying…

A generalization of hyperopic cops and robber, analogous to the $k$-visibility cops and robber, is introduced in this paper. For a positive integer $k$ the $k$-hyperopic game of cops and robber is defined similarly as the usual cops and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-24 Nicholas Crawford , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

Cops and Robber is a family of two-player games played on graphs in which one player controls a number of cops and the other player controls a robber. In alternating turns, each player moves (all) their figures. The cops try to capture the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-11 Minh Tuan Ha , Paul Jungeblut , Torsten Ueckerdt , Paweł Żyliński

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 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

We consider the cops and robber game variant consisting of one cop and one robber on time-varying graphs (TVG). The considered TVGs are edge periodic graphs, i.e., for each edge, a binary string $s_e$ determines in which time step the edge…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Nils Morawietz , Petra Wolf

Cops and Robbers is a pursuit evasion game played on a graph, first introduced independently by Quilliot \cite{quilliot1978jeux} and Nowakowski and Winkler \cite{NOWAKOWSKI1983235} over four decades ago. A main interest in recent the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Meagan Mann , Christian Muise , Erin Meger

We investigate extremal graphs related to the game of Cops and Robbers. We focus on graphs where a single cop can catch the robber; such graphs are called cop-win. The capture time of a cop-win graph is the minimum number of moves the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-21 David Offner , Kerry Ojakian

We introduce two variations of the cops and robber game on graphs. These games yield two invariants in $\mathbb{Z}_+\cup\{\infty\}$ for any connected graph $\Gamma$, the {weak cop number $\mathsf{wcop}(\Gamma)$} and the {strong cop number…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Jonathan Lee , Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza , Juan Felipe Rodríguez-Quinche

In this paper, we answer two open problems from [Breen et al., Throttling for the game of Cops and Robbers on graphs, Discrete Math., 341 (2018) 2418-2430]. The throttling number $th_c(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the minimum possible value of $k…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-10-23 Jesse Geneson

The game of cops and robbers, played on a fixed graph $G$, is a two-player game, where the cop and the robber (the players) take turns in moving to adjacent vertices. The game finishes if the cop lands on the robber's vertex. In that case…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jorge Cruz Chapital , Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan

In this paper, we study the game of cops and robber on the class of graphs with no even hole (induced cycle of even length) and claw (a star with three leaves). The cop number of a graph $G$ is defined as the minimum number of cops needed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Ramin Javadi , Ali Momeni

We consider the effect on the length of the game of Cops and Robbers when more cops are added to the game play. In Overprescribed Cops and Robbers, as more cops are added, the capture time (the minimum length of the game assuming optimal…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-11-24 Anthony Bonato , Xavier Pérez-Giménez , Paweł Prałat , Benjamin Reiniger

The game of cops and robber has been studied for many years. Denoting $\mathsf{Forb}(4K_1)$ to be the family of all graphs that contain no induced subgraph isomorphic to $4K_1$ (e.g., with independence number less than $4$), we prove that…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-15 Zhaoyu Wu

In the classic game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops pursues a robber through a graph. The traditional model of Cops and Robbers operates under the assumption that the cops know the robber's location at all times. Recently, however,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-08 John Jones , William B. Kinnersley