A cops and robber game and the meeting time of synchronous directed walks
Résumé
In a previous work, the authors showed that} the maximum number of infinitely long synchronous directed walks that never meet is equal to the dimension $d$ of the no-meet matroid, namely the largest order of a collection of vertex-disjoint cycles. Given \rev{$w > d$} , we want to compute the meeting time {of \rev{$w$} walks}: the first time step \rev{$t_w$} such that, given any set of \rev{$w$} walks, at least two of them must meet no later than \rev{$t_w$}. We precisely prove that the meeting time is at most \rev{$n - w+2$}, where $n$ is the number of vertices. A connection is established with a cops and robber game on directed graphs with helicopter cops and an invisible slow robber. The meeting time of \rev{$w$} walks equals the capture time in this game, when at most \rev{$w-1$} capture attempts are allowed.
While this capture time can be computed in polynomial time, we show that it is NP-hard to compute the minimum number of cops $h$ needed to catch the robber. More insights are also given on the number $h$ and its relation to pathwidth and other graph parameters. Finally we analyze these game measures on digraph tensor products.
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