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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 investigate a cheating robot version of Cops and Robber, first introduced by Huggan and Nowakowski, where both the cops and the robber move simultaneously, but the robber is allowed to react to the cops' moves. For conciseness, we refer…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-09-19 Nancy E. Clarke , Danny Dyer , William Kellough

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

Motivated by a biological scenario illustrated in the YouTube video \url{ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_mXDvZQ6dU} where a neutrophil chases a bacteria cell moving in random directions, we present a variant of the cop and robber game on…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Pamela Harris , Erik Insko , Alicia Prieto-Langarica , Rade Stoisavljevic , Shaun Sullivan

Cops and robbers is a pursuit-evasion game played on graphs. We completely classify the cop numbers for $n \times n$ knight graphs and queen graphs. This completes the classification of the cop numbers for all $n \times n$ classical chess…

We study a variant of the Cops and Robbers game on graphs in which the robbers damage the visited vertices, aiming to maximize the number of damaged vertices. For that game with one cop against $s$ robbers a conjecture was made by Carlson,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Miloš Stojaković , Lasse Wulf

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 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

Here we merge the two fields of Cops and Robbers and Graph Pebbling to introduce the new topic of Cops and Robbers Pebbling. Both paradigms can be described by moving tokens (the cops) along the edges of a graph to capture a special token…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Nancy Clarke , Joshua Forkin , Glenn Hurlbert

We consider a variation of cop vs.\ robber on graph in which the robber is not restricted by the graph edges; instead, he picks a time-independent probability distribution on $V(G)$ and moves according to this fixed distribution. The cop…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-23 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

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

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 a surrounding variant of cops and robbers on graphs of bounded genus. We obtain bounds on the number of cops required to surround a robber on planar graphs, toroidal graphs, and outerplanar graphs. We also obtain improved bounds…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Peter Bradshaw , Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini

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

In this paper we study the concurrent cops and robber (CCCR) game. CCCR follows the same rules as the classical, turn-based game, except for the fact that the players move simultaneously. The cops' goal is to capture the robber and the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-06-12 Georgios Konstantinidis , Athanasios Kehagias

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

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 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

Cops and robbers is a game between two players, where one tries to catch the other by moving along the edges of a graph. It is well known that on a finite graph the cop has a winning strategy if and only if the graph is constructible and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-31 Florian Lehner

In this paper, we study the game of cops and robber on the class of graphs with no even hole (induced cycle of even length) and claw (a star with three leaves). The cop number of a graph $G$ is defined as the minimum number of cops needed…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Ramin Javadi , Ali Momeni