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Related papers: The robber strikes back

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The Cops and Robber game on geodesic spaces is a pursuit-evasion game with discrete steps which captures the behavior of the game played on graphs, as well as that of continuous pursuit-evasion games. One of the outstanding open problems…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-02-09 Vesna Iršič , Bojan Mohar , Alexandra Wesolek

We consider a surrounding variant of cops and robbers on graphs of bounded genus. We obtain bounds on the number of cops required to surround a robber on planar graphs, toroidal graphs, and outerplanar graphs. We also obtain improved bounds…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini

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

In this paper, the notions of {\em trapping} and {\em confining} the robber on a graph are introduced. We present some structural necessary conditions for graphs $G$ not containing the path on $k$ vertices (referred to as $P_k$-free graphs)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-15 Masood Masjoody

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 consider a variant of the game of Cops and Robbers, called Lazy Cops and Robbers, where at most one cop can move in any round. We investigate the analogue of the cop number for this game, which we call the lazy cop number. Lazy Cops and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-12-09 Deepak Bal , Anthony Bonato , William B. Kinnersley , Paweł Prałat

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 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 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 study a variant of the classical cop-robber game played on compact metric graphs, where each edge is assigned a positive length and identified with a real interval of corresponding length. In this setting, both the cop and the robber…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Daniel Berend , Michael D. Boshernitzan

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

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a 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 graph $G$…

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

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

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…

We consider a variant of Cops and Robbers in which both the cops and the robber are allowed to traverse up to $s$ edges on each of their turns, where $s \ge 2$. We give several general for this new model as well as establish bounds for the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-06-27 William B. Kinnersley , Nikolas Townsend

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

Motivated by a biological scenario illustrated in the YouTube video \url{ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_mXDvZQ6dU} where a neutrophil chases a bacteria cell moving in random directions, we present a variant of the cop and robber game on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Pamela Harris , Erik Insko , Alicia Prieto-Langarica , Rade Stoisavljevic , Shaun Sullivan

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

In the cops and robber games played on a simple graph $G$, Aigner and Fromme's lemma states that one cop can guard a shortest path in the sense that the robber cannot enter this path without getting caught after finitely many steps. In this…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-04-11 Linyuan Lu , Zhiyu Wang

The game of cops and robbers is a pursuit game on graphs where a set of agents, called the cops try to get to the same position of another agent, called the robber. Cops and robbers has been studies on several classes of graphs including…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-19 Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Masood Masjoody , Ladislav Stacho