How to Guard a Graph?

We initiate the study of the algorithmic foundations of games in which a set of cops has to guard a region in a graph (or digraph) against a robber. The robber and the cops are placed on vertices of the graph; they take turns in moving to adjacent vertices (or staying). The goal of the robber is to enter the guarded region at a vertex with no cop on it. The problem is to find the minimum number of cops needed to prevent the robber from entering the guarded region. The problem is highly non-trivial even if the robber's or the cops' regions are restricted to very simple graphs. The computational complexity of the problem depends heavily on the chosen restriction. In particular, if the robber's region is only a path, then the problem can be solved in polynomial time. When the robber moves in a tree (or even in a star), then the decision version of the problem is NP-complete. Furthermore, if the robber is moving in a directed acyclic graph, the problem becomes PSPACE-complet

P.: Simple robots with minimal sensing: From local visibility to global geometry

We consider problems of geometric exploration and self-deployment for simple robots that can only sense the combinatorial (non-metric) features of their surroundings. Even with such a limited sensing, we show that robots can achieve complex geometric reasoning and perform many non-trivial tasks. Specifically, we show that one robot equipped with a single pebble can decide whether the workspace environment is a simplyconnected polygon or not; with sufficiently many pebbles, it can also count the number of holes in the environment. Highlighting the subtleties of our sensing model, we show that a robot can decide whether the environment is a convex polygon, yet it cannot resolve whether a particular vertex is convex. Finally, we show that using such local and minimal sensing, a robot can compute a proper triangulation of a polygon, and that the triangulation algorithm can be implemented collaboratively by a group of m such robots, each with Θ(n/m) memory. As a corollary of the triangulation algorithm, we derive a distributed analog of the well-known Art Gallery Theorem [1]: a group of ⌊n/3 ⌋ (bounded memory) robots in our minimal sens-∗ Work done while the author was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, ETH, Zurich. ing model can self-deploy to achieve visibility coverage of an n-vertex art gallery (polygon). This resolves an open question raised recently in [4].