The Game of Zombies and Survivors on the Cartesian Products of Trees

Abstract

We consider the game of Zombies and Survivors as introduced by Fitzpatrick, Howell, Messinger and Pike (2016) This is a variation of the game Cops and Robber where the zombies (in the cops' role) are of limited intelligence and will always choose to move closer to a survivor (who takes on the robber's role). The zombie number of a graph is defined to be the minimum number of zombies required to guarantee the capture of a survivor on the graph. In this paper, we show that the zombie number of the Cartesian product of $n$ non-trivial trees is exactly $\lceil 2n/3 \rceil$. This settles a conjecture by Fitzpatrick et. al. (2016) that this is the zombie number for the $n$-dimensional hypercube. In proving this result, we also discuss other variations of Cops and Robber involving active and flexible players.