Blind cop-width and balanced minors of graphs
Combinatorics
2025-12-01 v1
Abstract
We investigate a pursuit-evasion game on an undirected graph in which a robber, moving at a fixed constant speed, attempts to evade a team of cops who are blind to the robber's location and can quickly travel between any pair of vertices in the graph. The blind cop-width is the minimum number of cops needed to catch the robber on a given graph. We link it with other known graph parameters defined in terms of pursuit-evasion games, and show a new lower bound with respect to treewidth. The proof introduces the notion of balanced minors, where all branch sets of a minor model have equal size.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.22278,
title = {Blind cop-width and balanced minors of graphs},
author = {Hector Buffière and Rutger Campbell and Kevin Hendrey and Sang-il Oum},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22278},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
28 pages, 3 figures. An extended abstract was presented at Eurocomb 25