Department of Computer Science | Institute of Theoretical Computer Science | CADMO

Theory of Combinatorial Algorithms

Prof. Emo Welzl and Prof. Bernd Gärtner

Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with A. Steger, D. Steurer and B. Sudakov)

Mittagsseminar Talk Information

Date and Time: Thursday, July 06, 2017, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Jara Uitto

Tight Lower Bounds for the Cops and Robbers Game (Practice Talk)

For the game of cops and robbers, it is known that in 1-cop-win graphs, the cop can capture the robber in O(n) time and that there exist graphs in which this capture time is tight. When k ≥ 2, a simple counting argument shows that in k-cop-win graphs, the capture time is at most O( n^(k+1) ), however, no non-trivial lower bounds were previously known; indeed, in their 2011 book, Bonato and Nowakowski ask whether this upper bound can be improved. We answer the question of Bonato and Nowakowski on the negative, proving that the O(n^(k+1) ) bound is asymptotically tight for any constant k ≥ 2. This yields a surprising gap in the capture time complexities between the 1-cop and the 2-cop cases.


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