When You're A Node, You're A Node All The Way

Time for Wiki Wednesday.

You know - you go to Wikipedia, you click on "random article," you report on the outcome.

Here's my random Wiki Wednesday find for this week:

Pursuit-evasion

Pursuit-evasion (also sometimes referred to as cops and robbers) is a family of mathematical problems in which one group attempts to track down members of another group in an environment. Although early work on problems of this type modeled the environment geometrically (see e.g. Isaacs 1965) it is now common to use a formulation introduced by Parsons in 1976 in which movement is constrained by a graph.

There are innumerable possible variants of pursuit-evasion, though they tend to share many elements. A typical, basic example is as follows: Pursuers and evaders occupy nodes of a graph. The two sides take alternate turns, which consist of each member either staying put or moving along an edge to an adjacent node. If a pursuer occupies the same node as an evader the evader is captured and removed from the graph. The question usually posed is how many pursuers are necessary to ensure the eventual capture of all the evaders. [etc, etc, etc]

Dang, there are scary math problems and then there are scary math problems.

Comments

[Donna]

you lost me at "mathematical".