Lazy Cops and Robbers played on Graphs

Abstract

We consider a variant of the game of Cops and Robbers, called Lazy Cops and Robbers, where at most one cop can move in any round. We investigate the analogue of the cop number for this game, which we call the lazy cop number. Lazy Cops and Robbers was recently introduced by Offner and Ojakian, who provided asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the lazy cop number of the hypercube. By investigating expansion properties, we provide asymptotically almost sure bounds on the lazy cop number of binomial random graphs $\mathcal{G}(n,p)$ for a wide range of $p=p(n)$. By coupling the probabilistic method with a potential function argument, we also improve on the existing lower bounds for the lazy cop number of hypercubes. Finally, we provide an upper bound for the lazy cop number of graphs with genus $g$ by using the Gilbert-Hutchinson-Tarjan separator theorem.