A partition approach to lower bounds for zero-visibility cops and robber

Abstract

The zero-visibility cops and robber game is a variant of Cops and Robbers subject to the constraint that the cops have no information at any time about the location of the robber. We first study a partition problem in which for a given graph and an integer k, we want to find a partition of the vertex set such that the size of the boundary of the smaller subset in the partition is at most k while the size of this subset is as large as possible under some conditions. Then we apply such partitions to prove lower bounds on the zero-visibility cop numbers of graph products. We also investigate the monotonic zero-visibility cop numbers of graph products.