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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 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 consider a variant of Cops and Robbers wherein each edge traversed by the robber is deleted from the graph. The focus is on determining the minimum number of cops needed to capture a robber on a graph $G$, called the {\em bridge-burning…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-27 William B. Kinnersley , Eric Peterson

"Zombies and Survivor" is a variant of the well-studied game of "Cops and Robber" where the zombies (cops) can only move closer to the survivor (robber). We consider the deterministic version of the game where a zombie can choose their path…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-06-04 Valentin Bartier , Laurine Bénéteau , Marthe Bonamy , Hoang La , Jonathan Narboni

The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Lyuben Lichev , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

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 bound expected capture time and throttling number for the cop versus gambler game on a connected graph with $n$ vertices, a variant of the cop versus robber game that is played in darkness, where the adversary hops between vertices using…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Jesse Geneson , Carl Joshua Quines , Espen Slettnes , Shen-Fu Tsai

The cop throttling number $th_c(G)$ of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers is the minimum of $k + capt_k(G)$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $capt_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds needed for $k$ cops to capture the robber…

We consider the cops and robber game variant consisting of one cop and one robber on time-varying graphs (TVG). The considered TVGs are edge periodic graphs, i.e., for each edge, a binary string $s_e$ determines in which time step the edge…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Nils Morawietz , Petra Wolf

It is known that the class of all graphs not containing a graph $H$ as an induced subgraph is cop-bounded if and only if $H$ is a forest whose every component is a path. In this study, we characterize all sets $\mathscr{H}$ of graphs with…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Masood Masjoody , Ladislav Stacho

Interdicting a criminal with limited police resources is a challenging task as the criminal changes location over time. The size of the large transportation network further adds to the difficulty of this scenario. To tackle this issue, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Sukanya Samanta , Kei Kimura , Makoto Yokoo , Palash Dey

Pursuit-evasion games, such as the game of Revolutionaries and Spies, are a simplified model for network security. In the game we consider in this paper, a team of $r$ revolutionaries tries to hold an unguarded meeting consisting of $m$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-06-12 Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

We provide a game theoretic framework for the game of cops and robbers (CR). Within this framework we study certain assumptions which underlie the concepts of optimal strategies and capture time. We also point out a connection of these…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-07-08 Athanasios Kehagias , Georgios Konstantinidis

In this paper we analyze and model three open problems posed by Harris, Insko, Prieto-Langarica, Stoisavljevic, and Sullivan in 2020 concerning the tipsy cop and robber game on graphs. The three different scenarios we model account for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-01 Viktoriya Bardenova , Vincent Ciarcia , Erik Insko

In this paper, we consider a variant of the cops and robbers game on a graph, introduced by Kinnersley and Peterson, in which every time the robber uses an edge, it is removed from the graph, known as bridge-burning cops and robbers. In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-21 Rebekah Herrman , Peter van Hintum , Stephen G. Z. Smith

We consider a variant of the Cops and Robbers game where the robber can move t edges at a time, and show that in this variant, the cop number of a d-regular graph with girth larger than 2t+2 is Omega(d^t). By the known upper bounds on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-06-03 Abbas Mehrabian

We show that the cop number of directed and undirected Cayley graphs on abelian groups has an upper bound of the form of $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices, by introducing a refined inductive method. With our method, we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Jérémie Turcotte

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

Meyniel's conjecture states that $n$-vertex connected graphs have cop number $O(\sqrt{n})$. The current best known upper bound is $n/2^{(1-o(1))\sqrt{\log n}}$, proved independently by Lu and Peng (2011), and by Scott and Sudakov (2011). In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Prosenjit Bose , Louis Esperet , Jędrzej Hodor , Gwenaël Joret , Piotr Micek , Clément Rambaud

We investigate the interrelation between graph searching games and games with imperfect information. As key consequence we obtain that parity games with bounded imperfect information can be solved in PTIME on graphs of bounded DAG-width…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Bernd Puchala , Roman Rabinovich