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Lower Bounds for the Cop Number when the Robber is Fast

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2011

ABBAS MEHRABIAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, CanadaN2L 3G1 (e-mail: amehrabian@uwaterloo.ca)

Abstract

We consider a variant of the Cops and Robbers game where the robber can move t edges at a time, and show that in this variant, the cop number of a d-regular graph with girth larger than 2t+2 is Ω(dt). By the known upper bounds on the order of cages, this implies that the cop number of a connected n-vertex graph can be as large as Ω(n2/3) if t ≥ 2, and Ω(n4/5) if t ≥ 4. This improves the Ω() lower bound of Frieze, Krivelevich and Loh (Variations on cops and robbers, J. Graph Theory, to appear) when 2 ≤ t ≤ 6. We also conjecture a general upper bound O(nt/t+1) for the cop number in this variant, generalizing Meyniel's conjecture.

Type
Paper
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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