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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

Random walks on graphs can be slow. To speed them up, imagine that at each step instead of choosing the neighbor at random, there is a small probability $\varepsilon>0$ that we can choose it. We show that in this case, at least for graphs…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Boris Bukh , Quentin Dubroff

We show that the cop number of every generalized Petersen graph is at most 4. The strategy is to play a modified game of cops and robbers on an infinite cyclic covering space where the objective is to capture the robber or force the robber…

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

We derive an exact closed-form analytical expression for the distribution of the cover time for a random walk over an arbitrary graph. In special case, we derive simplified exact expressions for the distributions of cover time for a…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2009-10-20 Nikola Zlatanov , Ljupco Kocarev

We discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Sourav Chakraborty , Sujata Ghosh , Smiha Samanta

(abstract shortened to meet arxiv's length requirements) We investigate two variants of the classical Cops and robber game in graphs, recently introduced by Lee, Mart\'inez-Pedroza, and Rodr\'iguez-Quinche. The two versions are played in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Louis Esperet , Harmender Gahlawat , Ugo Giocanti

In this paper, we study different variants of the Cops-and-Robber game with respect to cop- and robber\-/monotonicity. We study a visible and invisible robber and variants where the robber is lazy, thus can only move when the cops announce…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Eva Fluck , David Philipps

For a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices, naively sampling the position of a random walk of at time $t$ requires work $\Omega(t)$. We desire local access algorithms supporting $\text{position}(G,s,t)$ queries, which return the position of a random…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Amartya Shankha Biswas , Edward Pyne , Ronitt Rubinfeld

In this paper we analyze and model three open problems posed by Harris, Insko, Prieto-Langarica, Stoisavljevic, and Sullivan in 2020 concerning the tipsy cop and robber game on graphs. The three different scenarios we model account for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-01 Viktoriya Bardenova , Vincent Ciarcia , Erik Insko

We study the graph-theoretic properties of the trace of random walks on pseudorandom graphs. We show that for any $\varepsilon>0$, there exists a constant $C$ such that the cover time of an $(n,d,\lambda)$-graph $G$ with $d/\lambda\ge C$ is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Yaobin Chen , Yiting Wang

We study a random walk that prefers tou se unvisited edges in the context of random cubic graphs. We establish asymptotically correct estimates for the vertex and edge cover times, these being $\approx n\log n$ and $\approx \frac32n\log n$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-01-04 Colin Cooper , Alan Frieze , Tony Johansson

For any given vertices $u$ and $v$ in a graph, the hitting time of a random walk on a finite graph is the number of steps it takes for a random walk to reach vertex $v$ starting at vertex $u$. The expected value of the hitting time is the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Aida Abiad , Yusaku Nishimura

We analyze the Hunter vs Rabbit game on graph, which is a kind of model of communication in an adhoc mobile network. Let $G$ be a cycle graph with $N$ nodes. The hunter can move from a vertex to another vertex on the graph along an edge.…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-03-06 Yuki Ikeda , Yasunari Fukai , Yoshihiro Mizoguchi

This article rigorously analyzes the meeting time between pursuers and evaders performing random walks on digraphs. There exist several bounds on the expected meeting time between random walkers on graphs in the literature, however,…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-06-26 Mishel George , Rushabh Patel , Francesco Bullo

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

We provide a rearrangement based algorithm for fast detection of subgraphs of $k$ vertices with long escape times for directed or undirected networks. Complementing other notions of densest subgraphs and graph cuts, our method is based on…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Zachary M. Boyd , Nicolas Fraiman , Jeremy L. Marzuola , Peter J. Mucha , Braxton Osting

An algorithm observes the trajectories of random walks over an unknown graph $G$, starting from the same vertex $x$, as well as the degrees along the trajectories. For all finite connected graphs, one can estimate the number of edges $m$ up…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-20 Anna Ben-Hamou , Roberto I. Oliveira , Yuval Peres

We consider a variation of a cops and robbers game in which the cop---here referred to as "hunter"---is not constrained by the graph but must play in the dark against a "mole." We characterize the graphs---which we will call…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-05-15 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

We present two efficient algorithms that compute the optimal strategy for cop in the game of Cop v.s. Gambler where the gambler's strategy is not optimal but known to the cop. The first algorithm is analogous to Bellman-Ford algorithm for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-01-11 Shen-Fu Tsai