Pursuing a fast robber on a graph (Q2268876)

The Cops and Robbers game as originally defined independently by Quilliot and by Nowakowski and Winkler in the 1980s has been much studied, but very few results pertain to the algorithmic and complexity aspects of it. In this paper it is proved that computing the minimum number of cops that are guaranteed to catch a robber on a given graph is NP-hard and that the parameterized version of the problem is \(W[2]\)-hard; the proof extends to the case where the robber moves \(s\) time faster than the cops. It is shown that on split graphs, the problem is polynomially solvable if \(s = 1\) but is NP-hard if \(s = 2\). It is also proved that on graphs of bounded cliquewidth the problem is polynomially solvable for \(s < 3\). Finally, it is shown that for planar graphs the minimum number of cops is unbounded if the robber is faster than the cops.