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The burning number of a graph was recently introduced by Bonato et al. Although they mention that the burning number generalises naturally to directed graphs, no further research on this has been done. Here, we introduce graph burning for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Remie Janssen

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

A team of $r$ {\it revolutionaries} and a team of $s$ {\it spies} play a game on a graph $G$. Initially, revolutionaries and then spies take positions at vertices. In each subsequent round, each revolutionary may move to an adjacent vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-08-06 Daniel W. Cranston , Clifford D. Smyth , Douglas B. West

Graph burning is a discrete-time process that models the spread of social contagion. Initially, all vertices are unburned. In each round, one unburned vertex is selected and burned, while any unburned vertex that has a burned neighbour from…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-01 Jesper Jansson , Shashanka Kulamarva , Yukihiro Murakami , Nikolaas Verhulst

A set S of vertices of a graph is a defensive alliance if, for each element of S, the majority of its neighbors is in S. The problem of finding a defensive alliance of minimum size in a given graph is NP-hard and there are polynomial-time…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-07-17 Bernhard Bliem , Stefan Woltran

We consider the cop-throttling number of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers, which is defined to be the minimum of $(k + \text{capt}_k(G))$, where $k$ is the number of cops and $\text{capt}_k(G)$ is the minimum number of rounds…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Jane Breen , Boris Brimkov , Joshua Carlson , Leslie Hogben , K. E. Perry , Carolyn Reinhart

Two kinds of approximation algorithms exist for the k-BALANCED PARTITIONING problem: those that are fast but compute unsatisfying approximation ratios, and those that guarantee high quality ratios but are slow. In this paper we prove that…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-04-29 Andreas Emil Feldmann

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

We introduce a graph partitioning problem motivated by computational topology and propose two algorithms that produce approximate solutions. Specifically, given a weighted, undirected graph $G$ and a positive integer $k$, we desire to find…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-07-04 Abdel-Rahman Madkour , Phillip Nadolny , Matthew Wright

The problem of determining the number of "flooding operations" required to make a given coloured graph monochromatic in the one-player combinatorial game Flood-It has been studied extensively from an algorithmic point of view, but basic…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Kitty Meeks , Dominik K. Vu

The deduction game is a variation of the game of cops and robber on graphs in which searchers must capture an invisible evader in at most one move. Searchers know each others' initial locations, but can only communicate if they are on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-24 Andrea Burgess , Danny Dyer , Mozhgan Farahani

We consider a search and rescue game introduced recently by the first author. An immobile target or targets (for example, injured hikers) are hidden on a graph. The terrain is assumed to dangerous, so that when any given vertex of the graph…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Thomas Lidbetter , Yifan Xie

With the increasing use of robots in daily life, there is a growing need to provide robust collaboration protocols for robots to tackle more complicated and dynamic problems effectively. This paper presents a novel, factor graph-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Messiah Abolfazli Esfahani , Ayşe Başar , Sajad Saeedi

The Burning Number Conjecture claims that for every connected graph $G$ of order $n,$ its burning number satisfies $b(G) \le \lceil \sqrt{n} \rceil.$ While the conjecture remains open, we prove that it is asymptotically true when the order…

The Graph Burning Problem (GBP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that has gained relevance as a tool for quantifying a graph's vulnerability to contagion. Although it is based on a very simple propagation model, its decision version…

We propose to study the problem of few shot graph classification in graph neural networks (GNNs) to recognize unseen classes, given limited labeled graph examples. Despite several interesting GNN variants being proposed recently for node…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Jatin Chauhan , Deepak Nathani , Manohar Kaul

In the classic game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops pursues a robber through a graph. The traditional model of Cops and Robbers operates under the assumption that the cops know the robber's location at all times. Recently, however,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-08 John Jones , William B. Kinnersley

Pursuit and evasion conflicts represent challenging problems with important applications in aerospace and robotics. In pursuit-evasion problems, synthesis of intelligent actions must consider the adversary's potential strategies.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-12 Isaac E. Weintraub , Meir Pachter , Eloy Garcia

How efficiently can we find an unknown graph using distance or shortest path queries between its vertices? Let $G = (V,E)$ be an unweighted, connected graph of bounded degree. The edge set $E$ is initially unknown, and the graph can be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-02-19 Sampath Kannan , Claire Mathieu , Hang Zhou

I consider the problem of learning an optimal path graphical model from data and show the problem to be NP-hard for the maximum likelihood and minimum description length approaches and a Bayesian approach. This hardness result holds despite…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-10 C. Meek