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Related papers: Lazy Cops and Robbers played on Graphs

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In the classic game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops pursues a robber through a graph. The traditional model of Cops and Robbers operates under the assumption that the cops know the robber's location at all times. Recently, however,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-08 John Jones , William B. Kinnersley

Cops and Robbers is a type of pursuit-evasion game played on a graph where a set of cops try to capture a single robber. The cops first choose their initial vertex positions, and later the robber chooses a vertex. The cops and robbers make…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Prosenjit Bose , Jean-Lou De Carufel , Anil Maheshwari , Karthik Murali

In the game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops attempts to capture a robber on a graph $G$. All players occupy vertices of $G$. The game operates in rounds; in each round the cops move to neighboring vertices, after which the robber does…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-06-20 William B. Kinnersley

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

The 'Cheating Robot' version of Cops and Robbers is played on a finite, simple, connected graph. The players move in the same time period. However, before moving, the robot observes to which vertices the cops are moving and it is fast…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-12 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski

The Cops and Robber game is played on undirected finite graphs. A number of cops and one robber are positioned on vertices and take turns in sliding along edges. The cops win if they can catch the robber. The minimum number of cops needed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-12-30 Nancy E. Clarke , Samuel Fiorini , Gwenaël Joret , Dirk Oliver Theis

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

We introduce two variations of the cops and robber game on graphs. These games yield two invariants in $\mathbb{Z}_+\cup\{\infty\}$ for any connected graph $\Gamma$, the {weak cop number $\mathsf{wcop}(\Gamma)$} and the {strong cop number…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Jonathan Lee , Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza , Juan Felipe Rodríguez-Quinche

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

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 consider a variant of the Cops and Robber game, introduced by Fomin, Golovach, Kratochvil, 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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-04-19 Abbas Mehrabian

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

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

We prove new theoretical results about several variations of the cop and robber game on graphs. First, we consider a variation of the cop and robber game which is more symmetric called the cop and killer game. We prove for all $c < 1$ that…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Espen Slettnes , Carl Joshua Quines , Shen-Fu Tsai , Jesse Geneson

Here we merge the two fields of Cops and Robbers and Graph Pebbling to introduce the new topic of Cops and Robbers Pebbling. Both paradigms can be described by moving tokens (the cops) along the edges of a graph to capture a special token…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Nancy Clarke , Joshua Forkin , Glenn Hurlbert

In many variants of the game of Cops and Robbers on graphs, multiple cops play against a single robber. In 2019, Cox and Sanaei introduced a variant of the game that gives the robber a more active role than simply evading the cop. In their…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-05-17 Joshua Carlson , Meghan Halloran , Carolyn Reinhart

We study a variation of the classical pursuit-evasion game of Cops and Robbers in which agents are required to move to an adjacent vertex on every turn. We explore how the minimum number of cops needed to catch the robber can change when…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-08-22 Ilya Gromovikov , William B. Kinnersley , Ben Seamone

The game of cops and robber is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs that has been extensively studied. Traditionally the game is played with one or more cops and only one robber, but in this paper we consider the game played with…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-15 Miha Gyergyek , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

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

We study a variant of the Cops and Robbers game on graphs in which the robbers damage the visited vertices, aiming to maximize the number of damaged vertices. For that game with one cop against $s$ robbers a conjecture was made by Carlson,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Miloš Stojaković , Lasse Wulf