The one-cop-moves game on planar graphs

Abstract

Cops and Robbers is a vertex-pursuit game played on graphs. In this game, a set of cops and a robber occupy the vertices of the graph and move alternately along the graph’s edges with perfect information about each other’s positions. If a cop eventually occupies the same vertex as the robber, then the cops win; the robber wins if she can indefinitely evade capture. Aigner and Fromme established that in every connected planar graph, three cops are sufficient to capture a single robber. In this paper, we consider a recently studied variant of the cops and robbers game, alternately called the one-active-cop game, one-cop-moves game or the lazy cops and robbers game, where at most one cop can move during any round. We show that Aigner and Fromme’s result does not generalize to this game variant by constructing a connected planar graph on which a robber can indefinitely evade three cops in the one-cop-moves game.