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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

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

(abstract shortened to meet arxiv's length requirements) We investigate two variants of the classical Cops and robber game in graphs, recently introduced by Lee, Mart\'inez-Pedroza, and Rodr\'iguez-Quinche. The two versions are played in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Louis Esperet , Harmender Gahlawat , Ugo Giocanti

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

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 theoretically analyze the Cops and Robber Game for the first time in a multidimensional grid. It is shown that for an $n$-dimensional grid, at least $n$ cops are necessary to ensure capture of the robber. We also present a set of cop…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-06-12 Sayan Bhattacharya , Goutam Paul , Swagato Sanyal

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 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 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

We consider the new game of Cops and Attacking Robbers, which is identical to the usual Cops and Robbers game except that if the robber moves to a vertex containing a single cop, then that cop is removed from the game. We study the minimum…

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

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 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

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

In this short paper we study the game of cops and robbers, which is played on the vertices of some fixed graph $G$. Cops and a robber are allowed to move along the edges of $G$ and the goal of cops is to capture the robber. The cop number…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-04-13 Alex Scott , Benny Sudakov

In this short paper we study the game of Cops and Robbers, played on the vertices of some fixed graph $G$ of order $n$. The minimum number of cops required to capture a robber is called the cop number of $G$. We show that the cop number of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-09-30 Zsolt Adam Wagner

The game of Cops and Robbers on graphs is a well-studied pursuit--evasion model whose central parameter, the cop number, captures the minimum number of pursuers required to guarantee capture of an adversary on a given graph. While the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-09 Nicholas Crawford , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

In this paper we study the concurrent cops and robber (CCCR) game. CCCR follows the same rules as the classical, turn-based game, except for the fact that the players move simultaneously. The cops' goal is to capture the robber and the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-06-12 Georgios Konstantinidis , Athanasios Kehagias

The game of cops and robber is a turn based vertex pursuit game played on a connected graph between a team of cops and a single robber. The cops and the robber move alternately along the edges of the graph. We say the team of cops win the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-11-30 Uttam K. Gupta , Suchismita Mishra , Dinabandhu Pradhan

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