English
Related papers

Related papers: Throttling numbers for adversaries on connected gr…

200 papers

In 2019, Sivaraman conjectured that every $P_k$-free graph has cop number at most $k-3$. In the same year, Liu proved this conjecture for $(P_k,\text{claw})$-free graphs. Recently Chudnovsky, Norin, Seymour, and Turcotte proved this…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Alexander Clow , Erin Meger

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 this paper, we study the game of cops and robber on the class of graphs with no even hole (induced cycle of even length) and claw (a star with three leaves). The cop number of a graph $G$ is defined as the minimum number of cops needed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Ramin Javadi , Ali Momeni

In this paper, the notions of {\em trapping} and {\em confining} the robber on a graph are introduced. We present some structural necessary conditions for graphs $G$ not containing the path on $k$ vertices (referred to as $P_k$-free graphs)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-15 Masood Masjoody

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

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

The following optimal stopping problem is considered. The vertices of a graph $G$ are revealed one by one, in a random order, to a selector. He aims to stop this process at a time $t$ that maximizes the expected number of connected…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-10-05 Fabrício Siqueira Benevides , Małgorzata Sulkowska

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 main topic of this paper is motivated by a localization problem in cellular networks. Given a graph $G$ we want to localize a walking agent by checking his distance to as few vertices as possible. The model we introduce is based on a…

Cops and Robbers is a game played on a graph where a set of cops attempt to capture a single robber. The game proceeds in rounds, where each round first consists of the cops' turn, followed by the robber's turn. In the cops' turn, every cop…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Prosenjit Bose , Pat Morin , Karthik Murali

This paper considers the Cops and Attacking Robbers game, a variant of Cops and Robbers, where the robber is empowered to attack a cop in the same way a cop can capture the robber. In a graph $G$, the number of cops required to capture a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Alexander Clow , Melissa A. Huggan , M. E. Messinger

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 investigate a cops and robber game on directed graphs, where the robber moves along the arcs of the graph, while the cops can select any position at each time step. Our main focus is on the cop number: the minimum number of cops required…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Walid Ben-Ameur , Alessandro Maddaloni

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 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 cop number $c(G)$ of a connected graph $G$ can be bounded as a function of the genus of the graph $g(G)$. The best known bound, that $c(G) \leq \left\lfloor \frac{3 g(G)}{2}\right\rfloor + 3$, was given by Schr\"{o}der,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Nathan Bowler , Joshua Erde , Florian Lehner , Max Pitz

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

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 show that the cop number of every generalized Petersen graph is at most 4. The strategy is to play a modified game of cops and robbers on an infinite cyclic covering space where the objective is to capture the robber or force the robber…

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