This book is the first and only one of its kind on the topic of Cops and Robbers games, and more generally, on the field of vertex pursuit games on graphs. The book is written in a lively and highly readable fashion, which should appeal to both senior undergraduates and experts in the field (and everyone in between). One of the main goals of the book is to bring together the key results in the field; as such, it presents structural, probabilistic, and algorithmic results on Cops and Robbers games. Several recent and new results are discussed, along with a comprehensive set of references. The book is suitable for self-study or as a textbook, owing in part to the over 200 exercises. The reader will gain insight into all the main directions of research in the field and will be exposed to a number of open problems.

This concise monograph present the complete history of the domination game and its variants up to the most recent developments and will stimulate research on closely related topics, establishing a key reference for future developments. The crux of the discussion surrounds new methods and ideas that were developed within the theory, led by the imagination strategy, the Continuation Principle, and the discharging method of Bujtás, to prove results about domination game invariants. A toolbox of proof techniques is provided for the reader to obtain results on the domination game and its variants. Powerful proof methods such as the imagination strategy are presented. The Continuation Principle is developed, which provides a much-used monotonicity property of the game domination number. In addition, the reader is exposed to the discharging method of Bujtás. The power of this method was shown by improving the known upper bound, in terms of a graph's order, on the (ordinary) domination number of graphs with minimum degree between 5 and 50. The book is intended primarily for students in graph theory as well as established graph theorists and it can be enjoyed by anyone with a modicum of mathematical maturity. The authors include exact results for several families of graphs, present what is known about the domination game played on subgraphs and trees, and provide the reader with the computational complexity aspects of domination games. Versions of the games which involve only the “slow” player yield the Grundy domination numbers, which connect the topic of the book with some concepts from linear algebra such as zero-forcing sets and minimum rank. More than a dozen other related games on graphs and hypergraphs are presented in the book. In all these games there are problems waiting to be solved, so the area is rich for further research. The domination game belongs to the growing family of competitive optimization graph games. The game is played by two competitors who take turns adding a vertex to a set of chosen vertices. They collaboratively produce a special structure in the underlying host graph, namely a dominating set. The two players have complementary goals: one seeks to minimize the size of the chosen set while the other player tries to make it as large as possible. The game is not one that is either won or lost. Instead, if both players employ an optimal strategy that is consistent with their goals, the cardinality of the chosen set is a graphical invariant, called the game domination number of the graph. To demonstrate that this is indeed a graphical invariant, the game tree of a domination game played on a graph is presented for the first time in the literature.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2007, held in Eilat, Israel, in October 2007 in the context of the combined conference ALGO 2007. The 63 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of three invited lectures address all current subjects in algorithmics reaching from design and analysis issues of algorithms over to real-world applications and engineering of algorithms in various fields.

Graph Searching Games and Probabilistic Methods is the first book that focuses on the intersection of graph searching games and probabilistic methods. The book explores various applications of these powerful mathematical tools to games and processes such as Cops and Robbers, Zombie and Survivors, and Firefighting. Written in an engaging style, the book is accessible to a wide audience including mathematicians and computer scientists. Readers will find that the book provides state-of-the-art results, techniques, and directions in graph searching games, especially from the point of view of probabilistic methods. The authors describe three directions while providing numerous examples, which include: • Playing a deterministic game on a random board. • Players making random moves. • Probabilistic methods used to analyze a deterministic game.

Contains activities dealing with charts and graphs, showing how to construct them, what can be plotted, and how they illustrate mathematical concepts.

This text is based on a lecture course given by the authors in the framework of Oberwolfach Seminars at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in May, 2013. It is intended to serve as a thorough introduction to the rapidly developing field of positional games. This area constitutes an important branch of combinatorics, whose aim it is to systematically develop an extensive mathematical basis for a variety of two player perfect information games. These ranges from such popular games as Tic-Tac-Toe and Hex to purely abstract games played on graphs and hypergraphs. The subject of positional games is strongly related to several other branches of combinatorics such as Ramsey theory, extremal graph and set theory, and the probabilistic method. These notes cover a variety of topics in positional games, including both classical results and recent important developments. They are presented in an accessible way and are accompanied by exercises of varying difficulty, helping the reader to better understand the theory. The text will benefit both researchers and graduate students in combinatorics and adjacent fields.

Model checking is a computer-assisted method for the analysis of dynamical systems that can be modeled by state-transition systems. Drawing from research traditions in mathematical logic, programming languages, hardware design, and theoretical computer science, model checking is now widely used for the verification of hardware and software in industry. The editors and authors of this handbook are among the world's leading researchers in this domain, and the 32 contributed chapters present a thorough view of the origin, theory, and application of model checking. In particular, the editors classify the advances in this domain and the chapters of the handbook in terms of two recurrent themes that have driven much of the research agenda: the algorithmic challenge, that is, designing model-checking algorithms that scale to real-life problems; and the modeling challenge, that is, extending the formalism beyond Kripke structures and temporal logic. The book will be valuable for researchers and graduate students engaged with the development of formal methods and verification tools.