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Related papers: Cops and robbers pebbling in graphs

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(abstract shortened to meet arxiv's length requirements) We investigate two variants of the classical Cops and robber game in graphs, recently introduced by Lee, Mart\'inez-Pedroza, and Rodr\'iguez-Quinche. The two versions are played in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Louis Esperet , Harmender Gahlawat , Ugo Giocanti

We consider the Cops and Robber pursuit-evasion game when the edge-set of the graph is allowed to change in time, possibly at every round. Specifically, the game is played on an infinite periodic sequence $\mathcal{G} = (G_0, \dots,…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Jean-Lou De Carufel , Paola Flocchini , Nicola Santoro , Frédéric Simard

We survey results at the intersection of topological graph theory and the game of Cops and Robbers, focusing on results, conjectures, and open problems for the cop number of a graph embedded on a surface. After a discussion on results for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-04-24 Anthony Bonato , Bojan Mohar

We prove new theoretical results about several variations of the cop and robber game on graphs. First, we consider a variation of the cop and robber game which is more symmetric called the cop and killer game. We prove for all $c < 1$ that…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Espen Slettnes , Carl Joshua Quines , Shen-Fu Tsai , 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

We consider the effect on the length of the game of Cops and Robbers when more cops are added to the game play. In Overprescribed Cops and Robbers, as more cops are added, the capture time (the minimum length of the game assuming optimal…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-11-24 Anthony Bonato , Xavier Pérez-Giménez , Paweł Prałat , Benjamin Reiniger

Aigner and Fromme initiated the systematic study of the cop number of a graph by proving the elegant and sharp result that in every connected planar graph, three cops are sufficient to win a natural pursuit game against a single robber.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Po-Shen Loh , Siyoung Oh

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 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

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

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

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

Cops and Robbers games have been studied for the last few decades in computer science and mathematics. As in general pursuit evasion games, pursuers (cops) seek to capture evaders (robbers); however, players move in turn and are constrained…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-04-27 Frédéric Simard , Josée Desharnais , François Laviolette

In the cops and robber games played on a simple graph $G$, Aigner and Fromme's lemma states that one cop can guard a shortest path in the sense that the robber cannot enter this path without getting caught after finitely many steps. In this…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-04-11 Linyuan Lu , Zhiyu Wang

In the game of cops and robber, the cops try to capture a robber moving 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 $G$. The biggest open conjecture in this area…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-09-25 Pawel Pralat , Nicholas Wormald

We investigate a pursuit-evasion game on an undirected graph in which a robber, moving at a fixed constant speed, attempts to evade a team of cops who are blind to the robber's location and can quickly travel between any pair of vertices in…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-01 Hector Buffière , Rutger Campbell , Kevin Hendrey , Sang-il Oum

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

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

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

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