Related papers: Optimal Strategies to Catch Randomly Walking Cat
Random walks are powerful tools to analyze spatial-temporal patterns produced by living organisms ranging from cells to humans. At the same time, it is evident that these patterns are not completely random but are results of a convolution…
Using mobile robots for autonomous patrolling of environments to prevent intrusions is a topic of increasing practical relevance. One of the most challenging scientific issues is the problem of finding effective patrolling strategies that,…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
We consider a simple random walk W_i in 1 or 2 dimensions, in which the walker may choose to stand still for a limited time. The time horizon is n, the maximum consecutive time steps which can be spent standing still is m_n and the goal is…
A planar set that contains a unit segment in every direction is called a Kakeya set. We relate these sets to a game of pursuit on a cycle $\Z_n$. A hunter and a rabbit move on the nodes of $\Z_n$ without seeing each other. At each step, the…
We study a new search problem on the plane involving a robot and an immobile treasure, initially placed at distance $1$ from each other. The length $\beta$ of an arc (a fence) within the perimeter of the corresponding circle, as well as the…
What is the fastest way of finding a randomly hidden target? This question of general relevance is of vital importance for foraging animals. Experimental observations reveal that the search behaviour of foragers is generally intermittent:…
The run-and-tumble walk, consisting in randomly reoriented ballistic excursions, models phenomena ranging from gas kinetics to bacteria motility. We evaluate the mean time required for this walk to find a fixed target within a 2D or 3D…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
The pursuit-evasion game with two persons is considered. Both players are moving in a metric space, have equal maximum speeds and complete information about the location of each other. We study the sufficient conditions for a capture (with…
More than fifty years ago, Bellman asked for the best escape path within a known forest but for an unknown starting position. This deterministic finite path is the shortest path that leads out of a given environment from any starting point.…
We consider the problem of finding a door along a wall with a blind robot that neither knows the distance to the door nor the direction towards of the door. This problem can be solved with the well-known doubling strategy yielding an…
Given a skew-symmetric matrix, the corresponding two-player symmetric zero-sum game is defined as follows: one player, the row player, chooses a row and the other player, the column player, chooses a column. The payoff of the row player is…
We study pursuit-evasion in a polygonal environment with polygonal obstacles. In this turn based game, an evader $e$ is chased by pursuers $p_1, p_2, ..., p_{\ell}$. The players have full information about the environment and the location…
We analyze the pedestrian evacuation of a rectangular room with a single door considering a Lattice Gas scheme with the addition of behavioral aspects of the pedestrians. The movement of the individuals is based on random and rational…
We consider a simple random walk (dimension one, nearest neighbour jumps) in a quenched random environment. The goal of this work is to provide sufficient conditions, stated in terms of properties of the environment, under which the Central…
This paper studies a stochastic robotic surveillance problem where a mobile robot moves randomly on a graph to capture a potential intruder that strategically attacks a location on the graph. The intruder is assumed to be omniscient: it…
Random walks on graphs can be slow. To speed them up, imagine that at each step instead of choosing the neighbor at random, there is a small probability $\varepsilon>0$ that we can choose it. We show that in this case, at least for graphs…
The pursuit-evasion game is studied for two adversarial active agents, modelled as a deterministic self-steering pursuer and a stochastic, cognitive evader. The pursuer chases the evader by reorienting its propulsion direction with limited…
When we want to simulate the realization of a symmetric simple random walk on $\mathbb Z^d$, we use $(2d)$-side fair dice to decide to which neighbor it jumps at each step if $d\geq 2$ or we simply use a fair coin when $d=1$. Assume that…