Cops and Invisible Robbers: the Cost of Drunkenness

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 examine two variants: in the first the robber is adversarial (he actively tries to avoid capture); in the second he is drunk (he performs a random walk). Our goal in this paper is to study the invisible Cost of Drunkenness (iCOD), which is defined as the ratio ct_i(G)/dct_i(G), with ct_i(G) and dct_i(G) being the expected capture times in the adversarial and drunk CiR variants, respectively. We show that these capture times are well defined, using game theory for the adversarial case and partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) for the drunk case. We give exact asymptotic values of iCOD for several special graph families such as $d$-regular trees, give some bounds for grids, and provide general upper and lower bounds for general classes of graphs. We also give an infinite family of graphs showing that iCOD can be arbitrarily close to any value in [2,infinty). Finally, we briefly examine one more CiR variant, in which the robber is invisible and "infinitely fast"; we argue that this variant is significantly different from the Graph Search game, despite several similarities between the two games

Hyperopic Cops and Robbers

We introduce a new variant of the game of Cops and Robbers played on graphs, where the robber is invisible unless outside the neighbor set of a cop. The hyperopic cop number is the corresponding analogue of the cop number, and we investigate bounds and other properties of this parameter. We characterize the cop-win graphs for this variant, along with graphs with the largest possible hyperopic cop number. We analyze the cases of graphs with diameter 2 or at least 3, focusing on when the hyperopic cop number is at most one greater than the cop number. We show that for planar graphs, as with the usual cop number, the hyperopic cop number is at most 3. The hyperopic cop number is considered for countable graphs, and it is shown that for connected chains of graphs, the hyperopic cop density can be any real number in $[0,1/2].

Visibility Graphs, Dismantlability, and the Cops and Robbers Game

We study versions of cop and robber pursuit-evasion games on the visibility graphs of polygons, and inside polygons with straight and curved sides. Each player has full information about the other player's location, players take turns, and the robber is captured when the cop arrives at the same point as the robber. In visibility graphs we show the cop can always win because visibility graphs are dismantlable, which is interesting as one of the few results relating visibility graphs to other known graph classes. We extend this to show that the cop wins games in which players move along straight line segments inside any polygon and, more generally, inside any simply connected planar region with a reasonable boundary. Essentially, our problem is a type of pursuit-evasion using the link metric rather than the Euclidean metric, and our result provides an interesting class of infinite cop-win graphs.Comment: 23 page

Cops and Robbers on diameter two graphs

In this short paper we study the game of Cops and Robbers, played on the vertices of some fixed graph $G$ of order $n$. The minimum number of cops required to capture a robber is called the cop number of $G$. We show that the cop number of graphs of diameter 2 is at most $\sqrt{2n}$, improving a recent result of Lu and Peng by a constant factor. We conjecture that this bound is still not optimal, and obtain some partial results towards the optimal bound.Comment: 5 page