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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

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

A gambler moves on the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. A cop pursues the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. What is the expected number of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-01-09 Jesse Geneson

We investigate extremal graphs related to the game of Cops and Robbers. We focus on graphs where a single cop can catch the robber; such graphs are called cop-win. The capture time of a cop-win graph is the minimum number of moves the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-21 David Offner , Kerry Ojakian

The game of cops and robbers, played on a fixed graph $G$, is a two-player game, where the cop and the robber (the players) take turns in moving to adjacent vertices. The game finishes if the cop lands on the robber's vertex. In that case…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jorge Cruz Chapital , Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan

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

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 show that the expected time for a smart "cop" to catch a drunk "robber" on an $n$-vertex graph is at most $n + {\rm o}(n)$. More precisely, let $G$ be a simple, connected, undirected graph with distinguished points $u$ and $v$ among its…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-11-05 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

We consider the well-studied cops and robbers game in the context of oriented graphs, which has received surprisingly little attention to date. We examine the relationship between the cop numbers of an oriented graph and its underlying…

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 consider a variation of cop vs.\ robber on graph in which the robber is not restricted by the graph edges; instead, he picks a time-independent probability distribution on $V(G)$ and moves according to this fixed distribution. The cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-23 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a connected graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any $n$-vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-11-23 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

We introduce a new variant of the game of Cops and Robbers played on graphs, where the robber is invisible unless outside the neighbor set of a cop. The hyperopic cop number is the corresponding analogue of the cop number, and we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-10-30 A. Bonato , N. E. Clarke , D. Cox , S. Finbow , F. Mc Inerney , M. E. Messinger

In the ordinary version of the pursuit-evasion game "cops and robbers", a team of cops and a robber occupy vertices of a graph and alternately move along the graph's edges, with perfect information about each other. If a cop lands on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-06-29 Brendan W. Sullivan , Nikolas Townsend , Mikayla Werzanski

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

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 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 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

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any n-vertex graph $G$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-08-12 John Haslegrave , Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

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