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Related papers: The robber strikes back

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A hole in a graph is an induced cycle of length at least 4. We give a simple winning strategy for t-3 cops to capture a robber in the game of cops and robbers played in a graph that does not contain a hole of length at least t. This…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-01-03 Vaidy Sivaraman

The deduction game is a variation of the game of cops and robber on graphs in which searchers must capture an invisible evader in at most one move. Searchers know each others' initial locations, but can only communicate if they are on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-24 Andrea Burgess , Danny Dyer , Mozhgan Farahani

We consider a cops and robber game where the cops are blocking edges of a graph, while the robber occupies its vertices. At each round of the game, the cops choose some set of edges to block and right after the robber is obliged to move to…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Stratis Limnios , Christophe Paul , Joanny Perret , Dimitrios M. Thilikos

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

We consider a new probabilistic graph searching game played on graphs, inspired by the familiar game of Cops and Robbers. In Zombies and Survivors, a set of zombies attempts to eat a lone survivor loose on a given graph. The zombies…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-03-31 Anthony Bonato , Dieter Mitsche , Xavier Pérez-Giménez , Paweł Prałat

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

We introduce a new game played on graphs, ``Agents and Adversary". This game is reminiscent of ``Cops and Robbers" but has some fundamental differences. We classify infinite families of graphs as Agents-win and Adversary-win. We then define…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-13 William K. Moses , Amanda Redlich , Frederick Stock

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…

Cops and Robbers games have been studied for the last few decades in computer science and mathematics. As in general pursuit evasion games, pursuers (cops) seek to capture evaders (robbers); however, players move in turn and are constrained…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-04-27 Frédéric Simard , Josée Desharnais , François Laviolette

Aigner and Fromme initiated the systematic study of the cop number of a graph by proving the elegant and sharp result that in every connected planar graph, three cops are sufficient to win a natural pursuit game against a single robber.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Po-Shen Loh , Siyoung Oh

We consider the Robber Locating Game, where an invisible moving robber tries to evade the pursuit of one or more helicopter cops, who send distance probes from anywhere on the graph. In this paper, we attempt to propose two useful…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Shiqi Pan

We investigate multiple variants of the game Cops and Robbers. Playing it on an $n \times n$ toroidal chess graph, the game is varied by defining moves for cops and robbers differently, always mimicking moves of certain chess pieces. In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-10-26 Allyson Hahn , Neil R. Nicholson

Various models to quantify the reliability of a network have been studied where certain components of the graph may fail at random and the probability that the remaining graph is connected is the proxy for reliability. In this work we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-24 Maimoonah Ahmed , Ben Cameron

We study the localization game on dense random graphs. In this game, a {\em cop} $x$ tries to locate a {\em robber} $y$ by asking for the graph distance of $y$ from every vertex in a sequence of sets $W_1,W_2,\ldots,W_\ell$. We prove high…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-05-16 Andrzej Dudek , Alan Frieze , Wesley Pegden

We introduce and study quantized versions of Cop and Robber game. We achieve this by using graph-preserving quantum operations, which are the quantum analogues of stochastic operations preserving the graph. We provide the tight bound for…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-11-29 Adam Glos , Jarosław Adam Miszczak

We introduce and study the Generalized Cops and Robbers game (GCR), an N-player pursuit game in graphs. The two-player version is essentially equivalent to the classic Cops and Robbers (CR) game. The three-player version can be understood…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Athanasios Kehagias

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

The deduction game may be thought of as a variant on the classical game of cops and robber in which the cops (searchers) aim to capture an invisible robber (evader); each cop is allowed to move at most once, and cops situated on different…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Andrea C. Burgess , Nancy E. Clarke , Shannon L. Fitzpatrick , Melissa A. Huggan

A gambler moves on the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. A cop pursues the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. What is the expected number of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-01-09 Jesse Geneson

In this note, we prove that all cop-win graphs G in the game in which the robber and the cop move at different speeds s and s' with s'<s, are \delta-hyperbolic with \delta=O(s^2). We also show that the dependency between \delta and s is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-12 Jérémie Chalopin , Victor Chepoi , Panos Papasoglu , Timothée Pecatte