Fionn Mc Inerney — Page 2

arXiv2020

The Game of Cops and Eternal Robbers

We introduce the game of Cops and Eternal Robbers played on graphs, where there are infinitely many robbers that appear sequentially over distinct plays of the game. A positive integer $t$ is fixed, and the cops are required to capture the robber in at most $t$ time-steps in each play. The associated optimization parameter is the eternal cop number, denoted by $c_t^{\infty},$ which equals the eternal domination number in the case $t=1,$ and the cop number for sufficiently large $t.$ We study the complexity of Cops and Eternal Robbers, and show that game is NP-hard when $t$ is a fixed constant and EXPTIME-complete for large values of $t$. We determine precise values of $c_t^{\infty}$ for paths and cycles. The eternal cop number is studied for retracts, and this approach is applied to give bounds for trees, as well as for strong and Cartesian grids.

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arXiv2020

A method for eternally dominating strong grids

In the eternal domination game, an attacker attacks a vertex at each turn and a team of guards must move a guard to the attacked vertex to defend it. The guards may only move to adjacent vertices and no more than one guard may occupy a vertex. The goal is to determine the eternal domination number of a graph which is the minimum number of guards required to defend the graph against an infinite sequence of attacks. In this paper, we continue the study of the eternal domination game on strong grids. Cartesian grids have been vastly studied with tight bounds for small grids such as $2\times n$, $3\times n$, $4\times n$, and $5\times n$ grids, and recently it was proven in [Lamprou et al., CIAC 2017, 393-404] that the eternal domination number of these grids in general is within $O(m+n)$ of their domination number which lower bounds the eternal domination number. Recently, Finbow et al. proved that the eternal domination number of strong grids is upper bounded by $\frac{mn}{6}+O(m+n)$. We adapt the techniques of [Lamprou et al., CIAC 2017, 393-404] to prove that the eternal domination number of strong grids is upper bounded by $\frac{mn}{7}+O(m+n)$. While this does not improve upon a recently announced bound of $\lceil\frac{m}{3}\rceil \lceil\frac{n}{3}\rceil+O(m\sqrt{n})$ [Mc Inerney, Nisse, Pérennes, CIAC 2019] in the general case, we show that our bound is an improvement in the case where the smaller of the two dimensions is at most $6179$.

cs.DM↗