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In the cops and robber game, there are multiple cops and a single robber taking turns moving along the edges of a graph. The goal of the cops is to capture the robber (move to the same vertex as the robber) and the goal of the robber is to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-04 Suryaansh Jain , Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram , Kartheek Sriram Tammana

Cops and Robbers is a type of pursuit-evasion game played on a graph where a set of cops try to capture a single robber. The cops first choose their initial vertex positions, and later the robber chooses a vertex. The cops and robbers make…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Prosenjit Bose , Jean-Lou De Carufel , Anil Maheshwari , Karthik Murali

Cops and robbers is a game between two players, where one tries to catch the other by moving along the edges of a graph. It is well known that on a finite graph the cop has a winning strategy if and only if the graph is constructible and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-31 Florian Lehner

The game of cops and robber is a two-player turn-based game played on a graph where the cops try to capture the robber. The cop number of a graph $G$, denoted by $c(G)$ is the minimum number of cops required to capture the robber. For a…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Arnab Char , Paras Vinubhai Maniya , Dinabandhu Pradhan

We consider the minimum order graphs with a given cop number. We prove that the minimum order of a connected graph with cop number 3 is 10, and show that the Petersen graph is the unique isomorphism type of graph with this property. We…

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

We consider a variant of Cops and Robbers wherein each edge traversed by the robber is deleted from the graph. The focus is on determining the minimum number of cops needed to capture a robber on a graph $G$, called the {\em bridge-burning…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-27 William B. Kinnersley , Eric Peterson

In the classical cop and robber game, two players, the cop C and the robber R, move alternatively along edges of a finite graph G. The cop captures the robber if both players are on the same vertex at the same moment of time. A graph G is…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Jérémie Chalopin , Victor Chepoi , Nicolas Nisse , Yann Vaxès

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 prove that every connected $P_5$-free graph has cop number at most two, solving a conjecture of Sivaraman. In order to do so, we first prove that every connected $P_5$-free graph $G$ with independence number at least three contains a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Maria Chudnovsky , Sergey Norin , Paul Seymour , Jérémie Turcotte

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…

Here we merge the two fields of Cops and Robbers and Graph Pebbling to introduce the new topic of Cops and Robbers Pebbling. Both paradigms can be described by moving tokens (the cops) along the edges of a graph to capture a special token…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Nancy Clarke , Joshua Forkin , Glenn Hurlbert

Cops and Robbers is a game played on a graph where a set of cops attempt to capture a single robber. The game proceeds in rounds, where each round first consists of the cops' turn, followed by the robber's turn. In the cops' turn, every cop…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Prosenjit Bose , Pat Morin , Karthik Murali

We study a variant of the classical Cops and Robbers game with one cop and one robber, in which the cop follows a fixed walk on the graph, a patrol, that is chosen before the game begins, while the robber is omniscient, he knows the entire…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Nina Chiarelli , Paul Dorbec , Miloš Stojaković , Andrej Taranenko

Cops and robbers is a vertex-pursuit game played on graphs. In the classical cops-and-robbers game, a set of cops and a robber occupy the vertices of the graph and move alternately along the graph's edges with perfect information about each…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Ziyuan Gao , Boting Yang

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

\textsc{Cops and Robber} is a game played on graphs where a set of \textit{cops} aim to \textit{capture} the position of a single \textit{robber}. The main parameter of interest in this game is the \textit{cop number}, which is the minimum…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Harmender Gahlawat

We provide new constructions of Meyniel extremal graphs, which are families of graphs with the conjectured largest asymptotic cop number. Using spanning subgraphs, we prove that there are an exponential number of new Meyniel extremal…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-24 Anthony Bonato , Ryan Cushman , Trent G. Marbach

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

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