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Related papers: Coarse cops and robber in graphs and groups

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We introduce the game of Surrounding Cops and Robbers on a graph, as a variant of the original game of Cops and Robbers. In contrast to the original game in which the cops win by occupying the same vertex as the robber, they now win by…

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 generalise the popular cops and robbers game to multi-layer graphs, where each cop and the robber are restricted to a single layer (or set of edges). We show that initial intuition about the best way to allocate cops to layers is not…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Jessica Enright , Kitty Meeks , William Pettersson , John Sylvester

Cops and Robbers is a well-studied pursuit-evasion game in which a set of cops seeks to catch a robber in a graph G, where cops and robber move along edges of G. The cop number of G is the minimum number of cops that is sufficient to catch…

Cops and Robbers is a type of pursuit-evasion game played on a graph where a set of cops try to capture a single robber. The cops first choose their initial vertex positions, and later the robber chooses a vertex. The cops and robbers make…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Prosenjit Bose , Jean-Lou De Carufel , Anil Maheshwari , Karthik Murali

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

The game of \emph{Cops and Robber} is usually played on a graph, where a group of cops attempt to catch a robber moving along the edges of the graph. The \emph{cop number} of a graph is the minimum number of cops required to win the game.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-04-29 Joshua Erde , Mihyun Kang , Florian Lehner , Bojan Mohar , Dominik Schmid

A generalization of hyperopic cops and robber, analogous to the $k$-visibility cops and robber, is introduced in this paper. For a positive integer $k$ the $k$-hyperopic game of cops and robber is defined similarly as the usual cops and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-24 Nicholas Crawford , Vesna Iršič Chenoweth

We study a variant of the classical Cops and Robbers game with one cop and one robber, in which the cop follows a fixed walk on the graph, a patrol, that is chosen before the game begins, while the robber is omniscient, he knows the entire…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Nina Chiarelli , Paul Dorbec , Miloš Stojaković , Andrej Taranenko

Cops and Robbers is a pursuit evasion game played on a graph, first introduced independently by Quilliot \cite{quilliot1978jeux} and Nowakowski and Winkler \cite{NOWAKOWSKI1983235} over four decades ago. A main interest in recent the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Meagan Mann , Christian Muise , Erin Meger

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

In this short paper we study the game of Cops and Robbers, played on the vertices of some fixed graph $G$ of order $n$. The minimum number of cops required to capture a robber is called the cop number of $G$. We show that the cop number of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-09-30 Zsolt Adam Wagner

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

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

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

This paper considers the Cops and Attacking Robbers game, a variant of Cops and Robbers, where the robber is empowered to attack a cop in the same way a cop can capture the robber. In a graph $G$, the number of cops required to capture a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Alexander Clow , Melissa A. Huggan , M. E. Messinger

We introduce a new variant of the game of Cops and Robbers played on graphs, where the robber is invisible unless outside the neighbor set of a cop. The hyperopic cop number is the corresponding analogue of the cop number, and we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-10-30 A. Bonato , N. E. Clarke , D. Cox , S. Finbow , F. Mc Inerney , M. E. Messinger

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

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 'Cheating Robot' version of Cops and Robbers is played on a finite, simple, connected graph. The players move in the same time period. However, before moving, the robot observes to which vertices the cops are moving and it is fast…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-03-12 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski