On the optimality of a simple strategy for searching graphs

Consider a search game with an immobile hider in a graph. A Chinese postman tour is a closed trajectory which visits all the points of the graph and has minimal length. We show that encircling the Chinese postman tour in a random direction is an optimal search strategy if and only if the graph is weakly Eulerian (i.e it consists of several Eulerian curves connected in a tree-like structure). Received: December 1999/Revised version: September 2000