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We consider the pursuit and evasion game on finite, connected, undirected graphs known as cops and robbers. Meyniel conjectured that for every graph on n vertices a rootish number of cops can win the game. We prove that this holds up to a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-05-20 Bela Bollobas , Gabor Kun , Imre Leader

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

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

We consider a Cops-and-Robber game played on the subsets of an $n$-set. The robber starts at the full set; the cops start at the empty set. On each turn, the robber moves down one level by discarding an element, and each cop moves up one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-02-24 William B. Kinnersley , Paweł Prałat , Douglas B. West

This paper is a contribution to the classical cops and robber problem on a graph, directed to two-dimensional grids and toroidal grids. These studies are generally aimed at determining the minimum number of cops needed to capture the robber…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-01-24 Fabrizio Luccio , Linda Pagli

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 game of Cops and Robbers, one of the most useful results is that an isometric path in a graph can be guarded by one cop. In this paper, we introduce the concept of wide shadow in a subgraph, and use it to characterize all 1-guardable…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Sebastián González Hermosillo de la Maza , Bojan Mohar

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 establish a lower bound for the cop number of graphs of high girth in terms of the minimum degree, and more generally, in terms of a certain growth condition. We show, in particular, that the cop number of any graph with girth $g$ and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-05-25 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Bojan Mohar , Ladislav Stacho

Meyniel's conjecture is one of the deepest open problems on the cop number of a graph. It states that for a connected graph $G$ of order $n,$ $c(G) = O(\sqrt{n}).$ While largely ignored for over 20 years, the conjecture is receiving…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-16 William Baird , Anthony Bonato

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

Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$. A classical upper bound for the domination number of a graph $G$ having no isolated vertices is $\lfloor\frac{n}{2}\rfloor$. However, for several families of graphs, we have $\gamma(G) \le…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-09 Subramanian Arumugam , Suresh Manjanath Hegde , Shashanka Kulamarva

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

A relational characterization of cop-win graphs was provided by Nowakowski and Winkler in their seminal paper on the game of Cops and Robbers. As a by-product of that characterization, each cop-win graph is assigned a unique ordinal, which…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-05-16 Anthony Bonato , Przemysław Gordinowicz , Gena Hahn

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

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

The traditional game of cops and robbers is played on undirected graph. Recently, the same game played on directed graph is getting attention by more and more people. We knew that if we forbid some subgraph we can bound the cop number of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-01-29 Mingrui Liu

Zero forcing can be described as a combinatorial game on a graph that uses a color change rule in which vertices change white vertices to blue. The throttling number of a graph minimizes the sum of the number of vertices initially colored…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Joshua Carlson , Juergen Kritschgau

We study relations between diameter $D(G)$, domination number $\gamma(G)$, independence number $\alpha(G)$ and cop number $c(G)$ of a connected graph $G$, showing (i.) $c(G) \leq \alpha(G)-\lfloor \frac{D(G)-3}{2} \rfloor$, and (ii.) $c(G)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-03-21 Jan Petr , Julien Portier , Leo Versteegen

In the `Covering' pursuit game on a graph, a robber and a set of cops play alternately, with the cops each moving to an adjacent vertex (or not moving) and the robber moving to a vertex at distance at most 2 from his current vertex. The aim…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-22 Benjamin Gillott