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Related papers: General Cops and Robbers Games with randomness

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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

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

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 zero-visibility cops and robbers game, where the robber is invisible to the cops until they are caught. This differs from the classic game where full information about the robber's location is known at any time. A previously…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Igor Potapov , Tymofii Prokopenko , John Sylvester

Cops and robbers is a game between two players, where one tries to catch the other by moving along the edges of a graph. It is well known that on a finite graph the cop has a winning strategy if and only if the graph is constructible and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-31 Florian Lehner

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

The game of cops and robbers is played on a fixed (finite or infinite) graph $G$. The cop chooses his starting position, then the robber chooses his. After that, they take turns and move to adjacent vertices, or stay at their current…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan

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

The guarding game is a game in which several cops try to guard a region in a (directed or undirected) graph against Robber. Robber and the cops are placed on the vertices of the graph; they take turns in moving to adjacent vertices (or…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-11-15 R. Samal , T. Valla

We consider a variant of the Cops and Robber game, 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 occupied by a cop. Let c_{infty}(G) denote the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-03-18 Abbas Mehrabian

Cops and Robbers is a type of pursuit-evasion game played on a graph where a set of cops try to capture a single robber. The cops first choose their initial vertex positions, and later the robber chooses a vertex. The cops and robbers make…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Prosenjit Bose , Jean-Lou De Carufel , Anil Maheshwari , Karthik Murali

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

Introduced by Harris, Insko, Prieto Langarica, Stoisavljevic, and Sullivan, the \emph{tipsy cop and drunken robber} is a variant of the cop and robber game on graphs in which the robber simply moves randomly along the graph, while the cop…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-03-13 Pamela E. Harris , Erik Insko , Florian Lehner

We investigate a cheating robot version of Cops and Robber, first introduced by Huggan and Nowakowski, where both the cops and the robber move simultaneously, but the robber is allowed to react to the cops' moves. For conciseness, we refer…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Nancy E. Clarke , Danny Dyer , William Kellough

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 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 Cops and Robber game is played on undirected finite graphs. A number of cops and one robber are positioned on vertices and take turns in sliding along edges. The cops win if they can catch the robber. The minimum number of cops needed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-12-30 Nancy E. Clarke , Samuel Fiorini , Gwenaël Joret , Dirk Oliver Theis

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, studied by Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt,…

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

These are some personal notes about the pursuit game of Cops and Robbers that I made starting in 2007. More old and new problems (and some solutions) will be added in future versions of these notes.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-11-01 Bojan Mohar

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