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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 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

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

We define new graph parameters, called flip-width, that generalize treewidth, degeneracy, and generalized coloring numbers for sparse graphs, and clique-width and twin-width for dense graphs. The flip-width parameters are defined using…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Szymon Toruńczyk

\textsc{Cops and Robber} is a game played on graphs where a set of \textit{cops} aim to \textit{capture} the position of a single \textit{robber}. The main parameter of interest in this game is the \textit{cop number}, which is the minimum…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Harmender Gahlawat

We theoretically analyze the Cops and Robber Game for the first time in a multidimensional grid. It is shown that for an $n$-dimensional grid, at least $n$ cops are necessary to ensure capture of the robber. We also present a set of cop…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-06-12 Sayan Bhattacharya , Goutam Paul , Swagato Sanyal

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

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

We study the vertex pursuit game of \emph{Cops and Robbers}, in which cops try to capture a robber on the vertices of the graph. The minimum number of cops required to win on a given graph $G$ is called the cop number of $G$. We focus on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-06-12 Noga Alon , Pawel Pralat

The cops-and-robber (CR) game has been used in mobile robotics as a discretized model (played on a graph G) of pursuit/evasion problems. The "classic" CR version is a perfect information game: the cops' (pursuer's) location is always known…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-02-26 Athanasios Kehagias , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

We study the entanglement game, which is a version of cops and robbers, on sparse graphs. While the minimum degree of a graph G is a lower bound for the number of cops needed to catch a robber in G, we show that the required number of cops…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Anders Martinsson , Florian Meier , Patrick Schnider , Angelika Steger

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

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

The game of Cops and Robber is traditionally played on a finite graph. The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyse the game that is played on an arbitrary geodesic space (a compact, path-connected space endowed with intrinsic…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2026-01-14 Bojan Mohar

We consider the cop-throttling number of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers, which is defined to be the minimum of $(k + \text{capt}_k(G))$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $\text{capt}_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Jane Breen , Boris Brimkov , Joshua Carlson , Leslie Hogben , K. E. Perry , Carolyn Reinhart

In the game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops attempts to capture a robber on a graph $G$. All players occupy vertices of $G$. The game operates in rounds; in each round the cops move to neighboring vertices, after which the robber does…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-06-20 William B. Kinnersley

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

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

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

We discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Sourav Chakraborty , Sujata Ghosh , Smiha Samanta