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The deduction game may be thought of as a variant on the classical game of cops and robber in which the cops (searchers) aim to capture an invisible robber (evader); each cop is allowed to move at most once, and cops situated on different…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Andrea C. Burgess , Nancy E. Clarke , Shannon L. Fitzpatrick , Melissa A. Huggan

In the game of cops and robber, the cops try to capture a robber moving 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 $G$. The biggest open conjecture in this area…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-12-12 Pawel Pralat , Nick Wormald

The game of cops and robbers, played on a fixed graph $G$, is a two-player game, where the cop and the robber (the players) take turns in moving to adjacent vertices. The game finishes if the cop lands on the robber's vertex. In that case…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jorge Cruz Chapital , Tomáš Flídr , Maria-Romina Ivan

We introduce two variations of the cops and robber game on graphs. These games yield two invariants in $\mathbb{Z}_+\cup\{\infty\}$ for any connected graph $\Gamma$, the {weak cop number $\mathsf{wcop}(\Gamma)$} and the {strong cop number…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-22 Jonathan Lee , Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza , Juan Felipe Rodríguez-Quinche

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

We consider generalisations of tree width to directed graphs, that attracted much attention in the last fifteen years. About their relative strength with respect to "bounded width in one measure implies bounded width in the other" many…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-08-21 Łukasz Kaiser , Stephan Kreutzer , Roman Rabinovich , Sebastian Siebertz

We consider a variation of a cops and robbers game in which the cop---here referred to as "hunter"---is not constrained by the graph but must play in the dark against a "mole." We characterize the graphs---which we will call…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-05-15 Natasha Komarov , Peter Winkler

We study zombies and survivor, a variant of the game of cops and robber on graphs. In this variant, the single survivor plays the role of the robber and attempts to escape from the zombies that play the role of the cops. The zombies are…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-04-27 Prosenjit Bose , Jean-Lou De Carufel , Thomas Shermer

Interdiction problems are leader-follower games in which the leader is allowed to delete a certain number of edges from the graph in order to maximally impede the follower, who is trying to solve an optimization problem on the impeded…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-10-02 Feng Pan , Aaron Schild

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

We consider a cops and robber game where the cops are blocking edges of a graph, while the robber occupies its vertices. At each round of the game, the cops choose some set of edges to block and right after the robber is obliged to move to…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Stratis Limnios , Christophe Paul , Joanny Perret , Dimitrios M. Thilikos

In this paper, we consider a new Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem where arms are nodes in an unknown and possibly changing graph, and the agent (i) initiates random walks over the graph by pulling arms, (ii) observes the random walk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianyu Wang , Lin F. Yang , Zizhuo Wang

In previous work, we introduced median decompositions, a generalisation of tree decompositions where a graph can be modelled after any median graph, along with a hierarchy of $i$-medianwidth parameters $(mw_i)_{i\geq 1}$ starting from…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-03-23 Konstantinos Stavropoulos

Andreae (1986) proved that the cop number of connected $H$-minor-free graphs is bounded for every graph $H$. In particular, the cop number is at most $|E(H-h)|$ if $H-h$ contains no isolated vertex, where $h\in V(H)$. The main result of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Franklin Kenter , Erin Meger , Jérémie Turcotte

Cops and Robbers games have been studied for the last few decades in computer science and mathematics. As in general pursuit evasion games, pursuers (cops) seek to capture evaders (robbers); however, players move in turn and are constrained…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-04-27 Frédéric Simard , Josée Desharnais , François Laviolette

We consider the Cops and Robber pursuit-evasion game when the edge-set of the graph is allowed to change in time, possibly at every round. Specifically, the game is played on an infinite periodic sequence $\mathcal{G} = (G_0, \dots,…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Jean-Lou De Carufel , Paola Flocchini , Nicola Santoro , Frédéric Simard

In this paper, we consider a variant of the cops and robbers game on a graph, introduced by Kinnersley and Peterson, in which every time the robber uses an edge, it is removed from the graph, known as bridge-burning cops and robbers. In…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-21 Rebekah Herrman , Peter van Hintum , Stephen G. Z. Smith

The localization game is a two player combinatorial game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The cops choose a set of vertices $S_1 \subseteq V$ with $|S_1|=k$. The robber then chooses a vertex $v \in V$ whose location is hidden from the cops, but…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Lyuben Lichev , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

We examine a version of the Cops and Robber (CR) game in which the robber is invisible, i.e., the cops do not know his location until they capture him. Apparently this game (CiR) has received little attention in the CR literature. We…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Athanasios Kehagias , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

Suppose an unpredictable evader is free to move around in a polygonal environment of arbitrary complexity that is under full camera surveillance. How many pursuers, each with the same maximum speed as the evader, are necessary and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-10-24 Kyle Klein , Subhash Suri