2025/12/20 by Daniel Berend, Michael Boshernitzan, Berend, Daniel +1
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #49N75 #91A44 #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Combinatorics (math.CO) #FOS: Mathematics #Game Theory and Applications #Graph Labeling and Dimension Problems #Primary 05C57 #Secondary 05C12
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.18468
openalex publication_date 2025/12/20 · openalex created_date 2025/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study a variant of the classical cop-robber game played on compact metric graphs, where each edge is assigned a positive length and identified with a real interval of corresponding length. In this setting, both the cop and the robber move continuously along the edges, subject to upper bounds on their speeds. The cop has no knowledge of the robber's location and must choose a continuous path through the graph that is guaranteed to intersect the robber's trajectory at some point in time. We show that for every compact metric graph, there exists a constant s > 0 such that if the cop's speed exceeds s times the robber's speed, then the cop can guarantee capture.