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The game of Cops and Robber is traditionally played on a finite graph. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyse the game that is played on an arbitrary geodesic space (a compact, path-connected space endowed with intrinsic…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2026-01-14 Bojan Mohar

The cop throttling number of a graph, introduced in 2018 by Breen et al., optimizes the balance between the number of cops used and the number of rounds required to catch the robber in a game of Cops and Robbers. In 2019, Cox and Sanaei…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Joshua Carlson , Robin Eagleton , Jesse Geneson , John Petrucci , Carolyn Reinhart , Preetul Sen

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

The localization game is a variant of the game of Cops and Robber in which the robber is invisible and moves between adjacent vertices, but the cops can probe any $k$ vertices of the graph to obtain the distance between probed vertices and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Vesna Iršič Chenoweth , Matija Skrt

A gambler moves between the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. Multiple cops pursue the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. We investigate the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-10-11 Jesse Geneson

In the classic cop and robber game, two players--the cop and the robber--take turns moving to a neighboring vertex or staying at their current position. The cop aims to capture the robber, while the robber tries to evade capture. A graph…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-02-17 Tanja Dravec , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth , Andrej Taranenko

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

The cops-and-robber (CR) game has been used in mobile robotics as a discretized model (played on a graph G) of pursuit/evasion problems. The "classic" CR version is a perfect information game: the cops' (pursuer's) location is always known…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-02-26 Athanasios Kehagias , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

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

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 Robber is traditionally played on a finite graph. The purpose of this note is to introduce and analyze the game that is played on an arbitrary geodesic space. The game is defined in such a way that it preserves the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Bojan Mohar

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 localization game is a pursuit-evasion game analogous to Cops and Robbers, where the robber is invisible and the cops send distance probes in an attempt to identify the location of the robber. We present a novel graph parameter called…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-21 Natalie C. Behague , Anthony Bonato , Melissa A. Huggan , Trent G. Marbach , Brittany Pittman

Let G denote a graph and let K be a subset of vertices that are a set of target vertices of G. The K-terminal reliability of G is defined as the probability that all target vertices in K are connected, considering the possible failures of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-10-17 Min-Sheng Lin , Chien-Min Chen

We consider the game of Cops and Robber played on the Cartesian product of two trees. Assuming the players play perfectly, it is shown that if there are two cops in the game, then the length of the game (known as the 2-capture time of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-11-02 Abbas Mehrabian

We study versions of cop and robber pursuit-evasion games on the visibility graphs of polygons, and inside polygons with straight and curved sides. Each player has full information about the other player's location, players take turns, and…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2016-01-07 Anna Lubiw , Jack Snoeyink , Hamideh Vosoughpour

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

The cop number of a graph $G$ is the smallest $k$ such that $k$ cops win the game of cops and robber on $G$. We investigate the maximum cop number of geometric intersection graphs, which are graphs whose vertices are represented by…

The game of Cops and Robbers is a well known game played on graphs. In this paper we consider the class of graphs of bounded diameter. We improve the strategy of cops and previously used probabilistic method which results in an improved…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-12-17 Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Fiachra Knox , Bojan Mohar

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