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Related papers: Accelerated Cops and Robbers

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We consider a Cops-and-Robber game played on the subsets of an $n$-set. The robber starts at the full set; the cops start at the empty set. On each turn, the robber moves down one level by discarding an element, and each cop moves up one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-02-24 William B. Kinnersley , Paweł Prałat , Douglas B. West

In the ordinary version of the pursuit-evasion game "cops and robbers", a team of cops and a robber occupy vertices of a graph and alternately move along the graph's edges, with perfect information about each other. If a cop lands on the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-06-29 Brendan W. Sullivan , Nikolas Townsend , Mikayla Werzanski

A gambler moves between the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. Multiple cops pursue the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. We investigate the…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2016-10-11 Jesse Geneson

The cop throttling number of a graph, introduced in 2018 by Breen et al., optimizes the balance between the number of cops used and the number of rounds required to catch the robber in a game of Cops and Robbers. In 2019, Cox and Sanaei…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Joshua Carlson , Robin Eagleton , Jesse Geneson , John Petrucci , Carolyn Reinhart , Preetul Sen

We study versions of cop and robber pursuit-evasion games on the visibility graphs of polygons, and inside polygons with straight and curved sides. Each player has full information about the other player's location, players take turns, and…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2016-01-07 Anna Lubiw , Jack Snoeyink , Hamideh Vosoughpour

The recently introduced variation of the game of cops and robber is played on geodesic spaces. In this paper we establish some general strategies for the players, in particular the generalized radial strategy and the covering space…

Metric Geometry · Mathematics 2022-11-07 Vesna Iršič , Bojan Mohar , Alexandra Wesolek

The game of cops and robber has been studied for many years. Denoting $\mathsf{Forb}(4K_1)$ to be the family of all graphs that contain no induced subgraph isomorphic to $4K_1$ (e.g., with independence number less than $4$), we prove that…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-15 Zhaoyu Wu

We consider a game in which a cop searches for a moving robber on a graph using distance probes, studied by Carragher, Choi, Delcourt, Erickson and West, which is a slight variation on one introduced by Seager. Carragher, Choi, Delcourt,…

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

We provide a sublinear bound on the cop throttling number of a connected graph. Related to the graph searching game Cops and Robbers, the cop throttling number, written $\mathrm{th}_c(G)$, is given by…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-28 Anthony Bonato , Sean English

The game of Cops and Robbers is a well known pursuit-evasion game played on graphs. It has been proved \cite{bounded_degree} that cubic graphs can have arbitrarily large cop number $c(G)$, but the known constructions show only that the set…

Various models to quantify the reliability of a network have been studied where certain components of the graph may fail at random and the probability that the remaining graph is connected is the proxy for reliability. In this work we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-24 Maimoonah Ahmed , Ben Cameron

Aigner and Fromme initiated the systematic study of the cop number of a graph by proving the elegant and sharp result that in every connected planar graph, three cops are sufficient to win a natural pursuit game against a single robber.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-07-07 Po-Shen Loh , Siyoung Oh

In this paper, the notions of {\em trapping} and {\em confining} the robber on a graph are introduced. We present some structural necessary conditions for graphs $G$ not containing the path on $k$ vertices (referred to as $P_k$-free graphs)…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-15 Masood Masjoody

We show that the cop number of every generalized Petersen graph is at most 4. The strategy is to play a modified game of cops and robbers on an infinite cyclic covering space where the objective is to capture the robber or force the robber…

Meyniel's conjecture states that $n$-vertex connected graphs have cop number $O(\sqrt{n})$. The current best known upper bound is $n/2^{(1-o(1))\sqrt{\log n}}$, proved independently by Lu and Peng (2011), and by Scott and Sudakov (2011). In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Prosenjit Bose , Louis Esperet , Jędrzej Hodor , Gwenaël Joret , Piotr Micek , Clément Rambaud

We consider a variation of Cops and Robber, introduced in [D. Cox and A. Sanaei, The damage number of a graph, [Aust. J. of Comb. 75(1) (2019) 1-16] where vertices visited by a robber are considered damaged and a single cop aims to minimize…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Melissa A. Huggan , Margaret-Ellen Messinger , Amanda Porter

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 discuss winning possibilities of players in various variants of cops and robber game played on large random graphs, a testbed for various kinds of network queries, search problems in particular. We explore the use of logic frameworks to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Sourav Chakraborty , Sujata Ghosh , Smiha Samanta

"Zombies and Survivor" is a variant of the well-studied game of "Cops and Robber" where the zombies (cops) can only move closer to the survivor (robber). We consider the deterministic version of the game where a zombie can choose their path…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-06-04 Valentin Bartier , Laurine Bénéteau , Marthe Bonamy , Hoang La , Jonathan Narboni

We study the zero-visibility cops and robbers game, where the robber is invisible to the cops until they are caught. This differs from the classic game where full information about the robber's location is known at any time. A previously…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Igor Potapov , Tymofii Prokopenko , John Sylvester