Bounds on the length of a game of Cops and Robbers

In the game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops attempts to capture a robber on a graph G. All players occupy vertices of G. The game operates in rounds; in each round the cops move to neighboring vertices, after which the robber does the same. The minimum number of cops needed to guarantee capture of a robber on G is the cop number of G, denoted c(G), and the minimum number of rounds needed for them to do so is the capture time. It has long been known that the capture time of an n-vertex graph with cop number k is O(nk+1). More recently, Bonato, Golovach, Hahn, and Kratochvíl ([3], 2009) and Gavenčiak ([10], 2010) showed that for k = 1, this upper bound is not asymptotically tight: for graphs with cop number 1, the cop can always win within n − 4 rounds. In this paper, we show that the upper bound is tight when k ≥ 2: for fixed k ≥ 2, we construct arbitrarily large graphs G having capture time at least (|V (G)|/40k4 )k+1. In the process of proving our main result, we establish results that may be of independent interest. In particular, we show that the problem of deciding whether k cops can capture a robber on a directed graph is polynomial-time equivalent to deciding whether k cops can capture a robber on an undirected graph. As a corollary of this fact, we obtain a relatively short proof of a major conjecture of Goldstein and Reingold ([11], 1995), which was recently proved through other means ([12], 2015). We also show that n-vertex strongly-connected directed graphs with cop number 1 can have capture time Ω(n2), thereby showing that the result of Bonato et al. [3] does not extend to the directed setting

Lower Bounds for the Cop Number When the Robber is Fast

We consider a variant of the Cops and Robbers game where the robber can move t edges at a time, and show that in this variant, the cop number of a d-regular graph with girth larger than 2t+2 is Omega(d^t). By the known upper bounds on the order of cages, this implies that the cop number of a connected n-vertex graph can be as large as Omega(n^{2/3}) if t>1, and Omega(n^{4/5}) if t>3. This improves the Omega(n^{(t-3)/(t-2)}) lower bound of Frieze, Krivelevich, and Loh (Variations on Cops and Robbers, J. Graph Theory, 2011) when 1<t<7. We also conjecture a general upper bound O(n^{t/t+1}) for the cop number in this variant, generalizing Meyniel's conjecture.Comment: 5 page

A note on bounds for the cop number using tree decompositions

In this short note, we supply a new upper bound on the cop number in terms of tree decompositions. Our results in some cases extend a previously derived bound on the cop number using treewidth