Abstract
Cops and robbers is a vertex-pursuit game played on graphs. In the classical cops-and-robbers game, a set of cops and a robber occupy the vertices of the graph and move alternately along the graph’s edges with perfect information about each other’s positions. If a cop eventually occupies the same vertex as the robber, then the cops win; the robber wins if she can indefinitely evade capture. Aigner and Frommer established that in every connected planar graph, three cops are sufficient to capture a single robber. In this paper, we consider a recently studied variant of the cops-and-robbers game, alternately called the one-active-cop game, one-cop-moves game or the lazy-cops-and-robbers game, where at most one cop can move during any round. We show that Aigner and Frommer’s result does not generalise to this game variant by constructing a connected planar graph on which a robber can indefinitely evade three cops in the one-cop-moves game. This answers a question recently raised by Sullivan, Townsend and Werzanski.
Research supported in part by an NSERC Discovery Research Grant, Application No. RGPIN-2013-261290.
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Notes
- 1.
Formal proofs establishing the one-cop-moves cop number of these graphs are usually quite tedious.
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Gao, Z., Yang, B. (2017). The Cop Number of the One-Cop-Moves Game on Planar Graphs. In: Gao, X., Du, H., Han, M. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. COCOA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10628. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71147-8_14
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