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Related papers: Cops and Robbers on Multi-Layer Graphs

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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 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 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

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 prove that the cop number of any $2K_2$-free graph is at most 2, proving a conjecture of Sivaraman and Testa. We also show that the upper bound of $3$ on the cop number of $2K_1+K_2$-free (co-diamond--free) graphs is best possible.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Jérémie Turcotte

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

In previous work, we introduced median decompositions, a generalisation of tree decompositions where a graph can be modelled after any median graph, along with a hierarchy of $i$-medianwidth parameters $(mw_i)_{i\geq 1}$ starting from…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-03-23 Konstantinos Stavropoulos

In the game of Cops and Robbers, the capture time of a graph is the minimum number of moves needed by the cops to capture the robber, assuming optimal play. We prove that the capture time of the $n$-dimensional hypercube is $\Theta (n\ln…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-16 Anthony Bonato , William B. Kinnersley , P. Gordinowicz , P. Pralat

Cops and Robbers is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs, of which many variants have been developed and studied. We introduce a variant of this game, "Sneaky-Active Cops and Robbers", where all cops and robber must move on their turn,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-16 Tien Chih , Laura Scull

Multi-layer graphs consist of several graphs (layers) over the same vertex set. They are motivated by real-world problems where entities (vertices) are associated via multiple types of relationships (edges in different layers). We chart the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Robert Bredereck , Christian Komusiewicz , Stefan Kratsch , Hendrik Molter , Rolf Niedermeier , Manuel Sorge

We introduce the bodyguard problem for graphs. This is a variation of Surrounding Cops and Robber but, in this model, a smallest possible group of bodyguards must surround the president and then maintain this protection indefinitely. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-15 Nancy E. Clarke , Danny Dyer , William Kellough

The game of Cops and Robber is traditionally played on a finite graph. The purpose of this note is to introduce and analyze the game that is played on an arbitrary geodesic space. The game is defined in such a way that it preserves the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Bojan Mohar

We prove that every connected $P_5$-free graph has cop number at most two, solving a conjecture of Sivaraman. In order to do so, we first prove that every connected $P_5$-free graph $G$ with independence number at least three contains a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Maria Chudnovsky , Sergey Norin , Paul Seymour , Jérémie Turcotte

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

Graphlets are induced subgraph patterns that are crucial to the understanding of the structure and function of a large network. A lot of efforts have been devoted to calculating graphlet statistics where random walk based approaches are…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Simiao Jiao , Zihui Xue , Xiaowei Chen , Yuedong Xu

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

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 consider a variation of Cops and Robber, introduced in [D. Cox and A. Sanaei, The damage number of a graph, [Aust. J. of Comb. 75(1) (2019) 1-16] where vertices visited by a robber are considered damaged and a single cop aims to minimize…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Melissa A. Huggan , Margaret-Ellen Messinger , Amanda Porter

In this paper we analyze and model three open problems posed by Harris, Insko, Prieto-Langarica, Stoisavljevic, and Sullivan in 2020 concerning the tipsy cop and robber game on graphs. The three different scenarios we model account for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-01 Viktoriya Bardenova , Vincent Ciarcia , Erik Insko

In this paper we consider the cop number of graphs with no, or few, short cycles. We show that when $G$ is graph of girth $g$ and the minimum degree $\delta \geq 2$, then $c(G) = O(n\log(n)(\delta-1)^{-\lfloor \frac{g+1}{4} \rfloor})$ as a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-07-22 Alexander Clow