English

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.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:57:47.123Z