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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

Cops and robbers is a vertex-pursuit game played on graphs. In the classical cops-and-robbers game, a set of cops and a robber occupy the vertices of the graph and move alternately along the graph's edges with perfect information about each…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Ziyuan Gao , Boting Yang

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 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

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 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

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

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

We show that the cop number of directed and undirected Cayley graphs on abelian groups has an upper bound of the form of $O(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of vertices, by introducing a refined inductive method. With our method, we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini , Jérémie Turcotte

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

Our first result gives a partial converse to a well-known theorem of A. Ancona for hyperbolic groups. We prove that a group $G$, equipped with a symmetric probability measure whose finite support generates $G$, is hyperbolic if it is…

Group Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-30 Victor Gerasimov , Leonid Potyagailo

We investigate the computational complexity of deciding whether k cops can capture a robber on a graph G. In 1995, Goldstein and Reingold conjectured that the problem is EXPTIME-complete when both G and k are part of the input; we prove…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-12-05 William B. Kinnersley

We show that the cop number of the Cayley sum graph of a finite group $G$ with respect to a symmetric subset $S$ is at most twice its degree when the graph is connected, undirected. We also prove that a similar bound holds for the cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Arindam Biswas , Jyoti Prakash Saha

A \emph{periodic graph} ${\cal G}=(G_0, G_1, G_2, \dots)$ with period $p$ is an infinite periodic sequence of graphs $G_i = G_{i + p} = (V,E_i)$, where $i \geq 0$. The graph $G=(V,\cup_i E_i)$ is called the footprint of ${\cal G}$.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Jean-Lou De Carufel , Paola Flocchini , Nicola Santoro , Frédéric Simard

We consider the well-studied cops and robbers game in the context of oriented graphs, which has received surprisingly little attention to date. We examine the relationship between the cop numbers of an oriented graph and its underlying…

A (finite or infinite) graph is called constructible if it may be obtained recursively from the one-point graph by repeatedly adding dominated vertices. In the finite case, the constructible graphs are precisely the cop-win graphs, but for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-08-02 Maria-Romina Ivan , Imre Leader , Mark Walters

Cops and Robber is a well-studied two-player pursuit-evasion game played on a graph, where a group of cops tries to capture the robber. The \emph{cop number} of a graph is the minimum number of cops required to capture the robber.…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Sandip Das , Harmender Gahlawat

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

\textsc{Cops and Robber} is one of the most studied two-player pursuit-evasion games played on graphs, where multiple \textit{cops}, controlled by one player, pursue a single \textit{robber}. The main parameter of interest is the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Harmender Gahlawat , Zin Mar Myint , Sagnik Sen

The game of cops and robbers, played on a fixed graph $G$, is a two-player game, where the cop and the robber (the players) take turns in moving to adjacent vertices. The game finishes if the cop lands on the robber's vertex. In that case…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jorge Cruz Chapital , Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan