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We show that the expected time for a smart "cop" to catch a drunk "robber" on an $n$-vertex graph is at most $n + {\rm o}(n)$. More precisely, let $G$ be a simple, connected, undirected graph with distinguished points $u$ and $v$ among its…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-11-05 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

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

The localization game is a variant of the game of Cops and Robber in which the robber is invisible and moves between adjacent vertices, but the cops can probe any $k$ vertices of the graph to obtain the distance between probed vertices and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Vesna Iršič Chenoweth , Matija Skrt

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

An isometric path between two vertices in a graph G is a shortest path joining them. The isometric-path number of G, denoted by ip(G), is the minimum number of isometric paths required to cover all vertices of G. In this paper, we determine…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Jun-Jie Pand , Gerard J. Chang

Cops and Robber is a family of two-player games played on graphs in which one player controls a number of cops and the other player controls a robber. In alternating turns, each player moves (all) their figures. The cops try to capture the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-11 Minh Tuan Ha , Paul Jungeblut , Torsten Ueckerdt , Paweł Żyliński

It is well known that the treewidth of a graph $G$ corresponds to the node search number where a team of cops is pursuing a robber that is lazy, visible and has the ability to move at infinite speed via unguarded path. In recent papers,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-28 Guillaume Mescoff , Christophe Paul , Dimitrios Thilikos

An isometric path between two vertices in a graph $G$ is a shortest path joining them. The isometric path number of $G$, denoted by $\ip(G)$, is the minimum number of isometric paths needed to cover all vertices of $G$. In this paper, we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Jun-Jie Pan , Gerard J. Chang

We consider a variation of the Cops and Robber game where the cops can only see the robber when the distance between them is at most a fixed parameter $\ell$. We consider the basic consequences of this definition for some simple graph…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-08-25 N. E. Clarke , D. Cox , C. Duffy , D. Dyer , S. Fitzpatrick , M. E. Messinger

The independent domination number $i(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the minimum cardinality of a maximal independent set of $G$, also called an $i(G)$-set. The $i$-graph of $G$, denoted $\mathscr{I}(G)$, is the graph whose vertices correspond to the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-03-16 R. C. Brewster , C. M. Mynhardt , L. E. Teshima

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 consider a variant of Cops and Robbers in which both the cops and the robber are allowed to traverse up to $s$ edges on each of their turns, where $s \ge 2$. We give several general for this new model as well as establish bounds for the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-06-27 William B. Kinnersley , Nikolas Townsend

We say that a vertex $v$ in a connected graph $G$ is decisive if the numbers of walks from $v$ of each length determine the graph $G$ rooted at $v$ up to isomorphism among all connected rooted graphs with the same number of vertices. On the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Frank Fuhlbrück , Johannes Köbler , Oleg Verbitsky , Maksim Zhukovskii

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 game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West showed that for any n-vertex graph $G$…

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

In this note, we prove that all cop-win graphs G in the game in which the robber and the cop move at different speeds s and s' with s'<s, are \delta-hyperbolic with \delta=O(s^2). We also show that the dependency between \delta and s is…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-12-12 Jérémie Chalopin , Victor Chepoi , Panos Papasoglu , Timothée Pecatte

An $\textit{isometric path}$ is a shortest path between two vertices. An $\textit{isometric path partition}$ (IPP) of a graph $G$ is a set $I$ of vertex-disjoint isometric paths in $G$ that partition the vertices of $G$. The…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-05-27 Irena Penev , R. B. Sandeep , D. K. Supraja , S. Taruni

We show that the cop number of any graph on 18 or fewer vertices is at most 3. This answers a question posed by Andreae in 1986, as well as more recently by Baird et al. We also find all 3-cop-win graphs on 11 vertices, narrow down the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Jérémie Turcotte , Samuel Yvon

An identifying code $C$ of a graph $G$ is a dominating set of $G$ such that any two distinct vertices of $G$ have distinct closed neighbourhoods within $C$. The smallest size of an identifying code of $G$ is denoted $\gamma^{\text{ID}}(G)$.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-08-01 Florent Foucaud , Tuomo Lehtilä

A graph G is a multi-interval PCG if there exist an edge weighted tree T with non-negative real values and disjoint intervals of the non-negative real half-line such that each node of G is uniquely associated to a leaf of T and there is an…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Tiziana Calamoneri , Angelo Monti , Fabrizio Petroni