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Related papers: Cops and Robbers on Geometric Graphs

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We consider the pursuit and evasion game on finite, connected, undirected graphs known as cops and robbers. Meyniel conjectured that for every graph on n vertices a rootish number of cops can win the game. We prove that this holds up to a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-05-20 Bela Bollobas , Gabor Kun , Imre Leader

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

We survey results at the intersection of topological graph theory and the game of Cops and Robbers, focusing on results, conjectures, and open problems for the cop number of a graph embedded on a surface. After a discussion on results for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-04-24 Anthony Bonato , Bojan Mohar

The game of Cops and Robbers is a well known pursuit-evasion game played on graphs. It has been proved \cite{bounded_degree} that cubic graphs can have arbitrarily large cop number $c(G)$, but the known constructions show only that the set…

This paper describes a 720-vertex connected planar graph G such that cop1(G), denoting the minimum number of cops needed to catch the robber in the 1-cop-move game on G, is at least 4 and at most 7. Furthermore, G has a connected subgraph H…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Wei Quan Lim

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a connected graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any $n$-vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-11-23 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

We consider a variation of cop vs.\ robber on graph in which the robber is not restricted by the graph edges; instead, he picks a time-independent probability distribution on $V(G)$ and moves according to this fixed distribution. The cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-23 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

The game of Cops and Robbers is a pursuit-evasion game on graphs that has been extensively studied in finite settings, particularly through the concept of cop number. In this paper, we explore infinite variants of the game, focusing on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Kenzie Fontenot , Iris Nguyen , Cody Olsen

We investigate a cheating robot version of Cops and Robber, first introduced by Huggan and Nowakowski, where both the cops and the robber move simultaneously, but the robber is allowed to react to the cops' moves. For conciseness, we refer…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Nancy E. Clarke , Danny Dyer , William Kellough

The cop throttling number of a graph, introduced in 2018 by Breen et al., optimizes the balance between the number of cops used and the number of rounds required to catch the robber in a game of Cops and Robbers. In 2019, Cox and Sanaei…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Joshua Carlson , Robin Eagleton , Jesse Geneson , John Petrucci , Carolyn Reinhart , Preetul Sen

The game of cops and robbers is played on a fixed (finite or infinite) graph $G$. The cop chooses his starting position, then the robber chooses his. After that, they take turns and move to adjacent vertices, or stay at their current…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan

The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Lyuben Lichev , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

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

We consider several variants of the classical Cops and Robbers game. We treat the version where the robber can move R > 1 edges at a time, establishing a general upper bound of N / \alpha ^{(1-o(1))\sqrt{log_\alpha N}}, where \alpha = 1 +…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-04-15 Alan Frieze , Michael Krivelevich , Po-Shen Loh

\textit{Pursuit-evasion games} have been intensively studied for several decades due to their numerous applications in artificial intelligence, robot motion planning, database theory, distributed computing, and algorithmic theory.…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Harmender Gahlawat , Meirav Zehavi

We investigate a cops and robber game on directed graphs, where the robber moves along the arcs of the graph, while the cops can select any position at each time step. Our main focus is on the cop number: the minimum number of cops required…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Walid Ben-Ameur , Alessandro Maddaloni

We study the entanglement game, which is a version of cops and robbers, on sparse graphs. While the minimum degree of a graph G is a lower bound for the number of cops needed to catch a robber in G, we show that the required number of cops…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Anders Martinsson , Florian Meier , Patrick Schnider , Angelika Steger

The main topic of this paper is motivated by a localization problem in cellular networks. Given a graph $G$ we want to localize a walking agent by checking his distance to as few vertices as possible. The model we introduce is based on a…

The localization game is a variant of the game of Cops and Robber in which the robber is invisible and moves between adjacent vertices, but the cops can probe any $k$ vertices of the graph to obtain the distance between probed vertices and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Vesna Iršič Chenoweth , Matija Skrt

We compare two kinds of pursuit-evasion games played on graphs. In Cops and Robbers, the cops can move strategically to adjacent vertices as they please, while in a new variant, called deterministic Zombies and Survivors, the zombies (the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-09-11 David Offner , Kerry Ojakian