Complexity of searching an immobile hider in a graph

AbstractWe study the computational complexity of certain search-hide games on a graph. There are two players, called searcher and hider. The hider is immobile and hides in one of the nodes of the graph. The searcher selects a starting node and a search path of length at most k. His objective is to detect the hider, which he does with certainty if he visits the node chosen for hiding. Finding the optimal randomized strategies in this zero-sum game defines a fractional path covering problem and its dual, a fractional packing problem. If the length k of the search path is arbitrary, then the problem is NP-hard. The problem remains NP-hard if the searcher may freely revisit nodes that he has seen before. In that case, the searcher selects a connected subgraph of k nodes rather than a path of k nodes. If k is logarithmic in the number of nodes of the graph, then the problem can be solved in polynomial time. This is shown using a recent technique called color-coding due to Alon, Yuster and Zwick. The same results hold for edges instead of nodes, that is, if the hider hides in an edge and the searcher searches k edges on a path or on a connected subgraph

Search for an Immobile Hider on a Stochastic Network

Harry hides on an edge of a graph and does not move from there. Sally, starting from a known origin, tries to find him as soon as she can. Harry's goal is to be found as late as possible. At any given time, each edge of the graph is either active or inactive, independently of the other edges, with a known probability of being active. This situation can be modeled as a zero-sum two-person stochastic game. We show that the game has a value and we provide upper and lower bounds for this value. Finally, by generalizing optimal strategies of the deterministic case, we provide more refined results for trees and Eulerian graphs.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figure

A competitive search game with a moving target

We introduce a discrete-time search game, in which two players compete to find an invisible object first. The object moves according to a time-varying Markov chain on finitely many states. The players are active in turns. At each period, the active player chooses a state. If the object is there then he finds the object and wins. Otherwise the object moves and the game enters the next period. We show that this game admits a value, and for any error-term epsilon > 0 , each player has a pure (subgame-perfect) epsilon-optimal strategy. Interestingly, a 0-optimal strategy does not always exist. We derive results on the analytic and structural properties of the value and the epsilon-optimal strategies. We devote special attention to the important timehomogeneous case, where we show that (subgame-perfect) optimal strategies exist if the Markov chain is irreducible and aperiodic