Subfield: Combinatorics


Question: This Question involves one Robber and one or more Cops. After robbing a bank, the Robber retreats to a network of hideouts, represented by dots in the diagram below. Every day, the Robber stays holed up in a single hideout, and every night, the Robber moves to an adjacent hideout. Two hideouts are adjacent if and only if they are connected by an edge in the diagram, also called a hideout map (or map). For the purposes of this Power Question, the map must be connected; that is, given any two hideouts, there must be a path from one to the other. To clarify, the Robber may not stay in the same hideout for two consecutive days, although he may return to a hideout he has previously visited. For example, in the map below, if the Robber holes up in hideout $C$ for day 1 , then he would have to move to $B$ for day 2 , and would then have to move to either $A, C$, or $D$ on day 3.

<img_3859>

Every day, each Cop searches one hideout: the Cops know the location of all hideouts and which hideouts are adjacent to which. Cops are thorough searchers, so if the Robber is present in the hideout searched, he is found and arrested. If the Robber is not present in the hideout searched, his location is not revealed. That is, the Cops only know that the Robber was not caught at any of the hideouts searched; they get no specific information (other than what they can derive by logic) about what hideout he was in. Cops are not constrained by edges on the map: a Cop may search any hideout on any day, regardless of whether it is adjacent to the hideout searched the previous day. A Cop may search the same hideout on consecutive days, and multiple Cops may search different hideouts on the same day. In the map above, a Cop could search $A$ on day 1 and day 2, and then search $C$ on day 3 .

The focus of this Power Question is to determine, given a hideout map and a fixed number of Cops, whether the Cops can be sure of catching the Robber within some time limit.

Map Notation: The following notation may be useful when writing your solutions. For a map $M$, let $h(M)$ be the number of hideouts and $e(M)$ be the number of edges in $M$. The safety of a hideout $H$ is the number of hideouts adjacent to $H$, and is denoted by $s(H)$.

The Cop number of a map $M$, denoted $C(M)$, is the minimum number of Cops required to guarantee that the Robber is caught.
Find $C(M)$ for the map below.

<img_3641>

Solution:
First we prove that for all maps $M, C(M)<h(M)$.

Prove. Let $n=h(M)$. The following strategy will always catch a Robber within two days using $n-1$ Cops, which proves that $C(M) \leq n-1$. Choose any subset $\mathcal{S}$ of $n-1$ hideouts and position $n-1$ Cops at the hideouts of $\mathcal{S}$ for 2 days. If the Robber is not caught on the first day, he must have been at the hideout not in $\mathcal{S}$, and therefore must move to a hideout in $\mathcal{S}$ on the following day.

so $C(M) \leq 6$. To see that 6 is minimal, note that it is possible for the Robber to go from any hideout to any other hideout in a single night. Suppose that on a given day, the Robber successfully evades capture. Without loss of generality, assume that the Robber was at hideout $A_{1}$. Then the only valid conclusion the Cops can draw is that on the next day, the Robber will not be at $A_{1}$. Thus the only hideout the Cops can afford to leave open is $A_{1}$ itself. If they leave another hideout open, the Robber might have chosen to hide there, and the process will repeat. So we get $C(M)=6$.

Final answer: 6