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In the game of \emph{cops and robbers} on a graph $G = (V,E)$, $k$ cops try to catch a robber. On the cop turn, each cop may move to a neighboring vertex or remain in place. On the robber's turn, he moves similarly. The cops win if there is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-04-03 Andrew Beveridge , Paolo Codenotti , Aaron Maurer , John McCauley , Silviya Valeva

We introduce the game of Cops and Eternal Robbers played on graphs, where there are infinitely many robbers that appear sequentially over distinct plays of the game. A positive integer $t$ is fixed, and the cops are required to capture the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Anthony Bonato , Melissa Huggan , Trent Marbach , Fionn Mc Inerney

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 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

In the `Covering' pursuit game on a graph, a robber and a set of cops play alternately, with the cops each moving to an adjacent vertex (or not moving) and the robber moving to a vertex at distance at most 2 from his current vertex. The aim…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-22 Benjamin Gillott

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

In the game of Cops and Robber, a team of cops attempts to capture a robber on a graph $G$. Initially, all cops occupy some vertices in $G$ and the robber occupies another vertex. In each round, a cop can move to one of its neighbors or…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-09-02 Mingrui Liu

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

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 generalise the popular cops and robbers game to multi-layer graphs, where each cop and the robber are restricted to a single layer (or set of edges). We show that initial intuition about the best way to allocate cops to layers is not…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Jessica Enright , Kitty Meeks , William Pettersson , John Sylvester

We consider a variant of the Cops and Robber game, in which the robber has unbounded speed, i.e. can take any path from her vertex in her turn, but she is not allowed to pass through a vertex occupied by a cop. Let c_{infty}(G) denote the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-03-18 Abbas Mehrabian

The cops and robbers game has been extensively studied under the assumption of optimal play by both the cops and the robbers. In this paper we study the problem in which cops are chasing a drunk robber (that is, a robber who performs a…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-01-09 Athanasios Kehagias , Pawel Pralat

We consider the Cops and Robber pursuit-evasion game when the edge-set of the graph is allowed to change in time, possibly at every round. Specifically, the game is played on an infinite periodic sequence $\mathcal{G} = (G_0, \dots,…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Jean-Lou De Carufel , Paola Flocchini , Nicola Santoro , Frédéric Simard

\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 study the problem of cops and robbers on the grid where the robber is allowed to move faster than the cops. It is well known that two cops are necessary and sufficient to catch the robber on any finite grid when the robber has unit…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-06-06 Paul Balister , Béla Bollobás , Bhargav Narayanan , Amy Shaw

We consider "surrounding" versions of the classic Cops and Robber game. The game is played on a connected graph in which two players, one controlling a number of cops and the other controlling a robber, take alternating turns. In a turn,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-14 Paul Jungeblut , Samuel Schneider , Torsten Ueckerdt

Cops and Robber is a family of two-player games played on graphs in which one player controls a number of cops and the other player controls a robber. In alternating turns, each player moves (all) their figures. The cops try to capture the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-11 Minh Tuan Ha , Paul Jungeblut , Torsten Ueckerdt , Paweł Żyliński

This paper considers a game in which a single cop and a single robber take turns moving along the edges of a given graph $G$. If there exists a strategy for the cop which enables it to be positioned at the same vertex as the robber…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Thomas Erlebach , Jakob T. Spooner

We consider a variation of the Cops and Robber game where the cops can only see the robber when the distance between them is at most a fixed parameter $\ell$. We consider the basic consequences of this definition for some simple graph…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-08-25 N. E. Clarke , D. Cox , C. Duffy , D. Dyer , S. Fitzpatrick , M. E. Messinger

We consider a variant of the game of Cops and Robbers, called Containment, in which cops move from edge to adjacent edge, the robber moves from vertex to adjacent vertex (but cannot move along an edge occupied by a cop). The cops win by…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-05-08 Pawel Pralat