Cops, robbers, and burning bridges

12/24/2018

∙

by   William B. Kinnersley, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

We consider a variant of Cops and Robbers wherein each edge traversed by the robber is deleted from the graph. The focus is on determining the minimum number of cops needed to capture a robber on a graph G, called the bridge-burning cop number of G and denoted c_b(G). We determine c_b(G) exactly for several elementary classes of graphs and give a polynomial-time algorithm to compute c_b(T) when T is a tree. We also study two-dimensional square grids and tori, as well as hypercubes, and we give bounds on the capture time of a graph (the minimum number of rounds needed for a single cop to capture a robber on G, provided that c_b(G) = 1).