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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Iršič, Vesna, Mohar, Bojan, Wesolek, Alexandra
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05753
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author Iršič, Vesna
Mohar, Bojan
Wesolek, Alexandra
author_facet Iršič, Vesna
Mohar, Bojan
Wesolek, Alexandra
contents The Cops and Robber game on geodesic spaces is a pursuit-evasion game with discrete steps which captures the behavior of the game played on graphs, as well as that of continuous pursuit-evasion games. One of the outstanding open problems about the game on graphs is to determine which graphs embeddable in a surface of genus $g$ have largest cop number. It is known that the cop number of genus $g$ graphs is $O(g)$ and that there are examples whose cop number is $\tildeΩ(\sqrt{g}\,)$. The same phenomenon occurs when the game is played on geodesic surfaces. In this paper we obtain a surprising result about the game on a surface with constant curvature. It is shown that two cops have a strategy to come arbitrarily close to the robber, independently of the genus. We also discuss upper bounds on the number of cops needed to catch the robber. Our results generalize to higher-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05753
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cops and Robber on Hyperbolic Manifolds
Iršič, Vesna
Mohar, Bojan
Wesolek, Alexandra
Combinatorics
Computational Geometry
Metric Geometry
91A05, 91A50, 32Q45
The Cops and Robber game on geodesic spaces is a pursuit-evasion game with discrete steps which captures the behavior of the game played on graphs, as well as that of continuous pursuit-evasion games. One of the outstanding open problems about the game on graphs is to determine which graphs embeddable in a surface of genus $g$ have largest cop number. It is known that the cop number of genus $g$ graphs is $O(g)$ and that there are examples whose cop number is $\tildeΩ(\sqrt{g}\,)$. The same phenomenon occurs when the game is played on geodesic surfaces. In this paper we obtain a surprising result about the game on a surface with constant curvature. It is shown that two cops have a strategy to come arbitrarily close to the robber, independently of the genus. We also discuss upper bounds on the number of cops needed to catch the robber. Our results generalize to higher-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds.
title Cops and Robber on Hyperbolic Manifolds
topic Combinatorics
Computational Geometry
Metric Geometry
91A05, 91A50, 32Q45
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05753