Meyniel's conjecture holds for random d‐regular graphs

In the game of cops and robber, the cops try to capture a robber moving on the vertices of the graph. The minimum number of cops required to win on a given graph G is called the cop number of G. The biggest open conjecture in this area is the one of Meyniel, which asserts that for some absolute constant C, the cop number of every connected graph G is at most . In a separate paper, we showed that Meyniel's conjecture holds asymptotically almost surely for the binomial random graph. The result was obtained by showing that the conjecture holds for a general class of graphs with some specific expansion‐type properties. In this paper, this deterministic result is used to show that the conjecture holds asymptotically almost surely for random d‐regular graphs when d = d(n) ≥ 3.     

Chasing robbers on random graphs: Zigzag theorem

In this paper, we study the vertex pursuit game of Cops and Robbers where cops try to capture a robber on the vertices of the graph. The minimum number of cops required to win on a given graph G is the cop number of G. We present asymptotic results for the game of Cops and Robber played on a random graph G(n,p) for a wide range of p = p(n). It has been shown that the cop number as a function of an average degree forms an intriguing zigzag shape. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2010     

Large classes of infinite k‐cop‐win graphs

While finite cop‐win finite graphs possess a good structural characterization, none is known for infinite cop‐win graphs. As evidence that such a characterization might not exist, we provide as large as possible classes of infinite graphs with finite cop number. More precisely, for each infinite cardinal κ and each positive integer k, we construct 2^κ non‐isomorphic k‐cop‐win graphs satisfying additional properties such as vertex‐transitivity, or having universal endomorphism monoid and automorphism group. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 65: 334–342, 2010     

A note on k-cop-win graphs

The game of Cops and Robbers is a very well known game played on graphs. In this paper we will show that minimum order of a graph that needs $k$ cops to guarantee the robber’s capture is increasing in $k$.     

Modularity in random regular graphs and lattices

Given a graph G, the modularity of a partition of the vertex set measures the extent to which edge density is higher within parts than between parts; and the modularity of G is the maximum modularity of a partition.We give an upper bound on the modularity of r-regular graphs as a function of the edge expansion (or isoperimetric number) under the restriction that each part in our partition has a sub-linear numbers of vertices. This leads to results for random r-regular graphs. In particular we show the modularity of a random cubic graph partitioned into sub-linear parts is almost surely in the interval (0.66, 0.88).The modularity of a complete rectangular section of the integer lattice in a fixed dimension was estimated in Guimer et. al. [R. Guimerà, M. Sales-Pardo and L.A. Amaral, Modularity from fluctuations in random graphs and complex networks, Phys. Rev. E 70 (2) (2004) 025101]. We extend this result to any subgraph of such a lattice, and indeed to more general graphs.     

The diameter of inhomogeneous random graphs

In this paper, we study the diameter of inhomogeneous random graphs that are induced by irreducible kernels . The kernels we consider act on separable metric spaces and are almost everywhere continuous. We generalize results known for the Erdős–Rényi model G(n, p) for several ranges of p. We find upper and lower bounds for the diameter of in terms of the expansion factor and two explicit constants that depend on the behavior of the kernel over partitions of the metric space.     

Random walks on random simple graphs

This paper looks at random regular simple graphs and considers nearest neighbor random walks on such graphs. This paper considers walks where the degree d of each vertex is around (log n)^a where a is a constant which is at least 2 and where n is the number of vertices. By extending techniques of Dou, this paper shows that for most such graphs, the position of the random walk becomes close to uniformly distributed after slightly more than log n/log d steps. This paper also gets similar results for the random graph G(n, p), where p = d/(n − 1). © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Discrepancy of random graphs and hypergraphs

Answering in a strong form a question posed by Bollobás and Scott, in this paper we determine the discrepancy between two random k‐uniform hypergraphs, up to a constant factor depending solely on k. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 47, 147–162, 2015     

Throttling for the game of Cops and Robbers on graphs

We consider the cop-throttling number of a graph $G$ for the game of Cops and Robbers, which is defined to be the minimum of $(k+{\mathrm{capt}}_k\left(G\right))$, where $k$ is the number of cops and ${\mathrm{capt}}_k\left(G\right)$ is the minimum number of rounds needed for $k$ cops to capture the robber on $G$ over all possible games. We provide some tools for bounding the cop-throttling number, including showing that the positive semidefinite (PSD) throttling number, a variant of zero forcing throttling, is an upper bound for the cop-throttling number. We also characterize graphs having low cop-throttling number and investigate how large the cop-throttling number can be for a given graph. We consider trees, unicyclic graphs, incidence graphs of finite projective planes (a Meyniel extremal family of graphs), a family of cop-win graphs with maximum capture time, grids, and hypercubes. All the upper bounds on the cop-throttling number we obtain for families of graphs are $O\left(\sqrt{n}\right)$.     

Countable sparse random graphs

For each irrational a, 0<a<1, a particular countable graph G is defined which mirrors the asymptotic behavior of the random graph G(n, p) with edge probability p = n^?a.     

Randomly coloring random graphs

We consider the problem of generating a coloring of the random graph ??_n,p uniformly at random using a natural Markov chain algorithm: the Glauber dynamics. We assume that there are βΔ colors available, where Δ is the maximum degree of the graph, and we wish to determine the least β = β(p) such that the distribution is close to uniform in O(n log n) steps of the chain. This problem has been previously studied for ??_n,p in cases where np is relatively small. Here we consider the “dense” cases, where np ε [ω ln n, n] and ω = ω(n) → ∞. Our methods are closely tailored to the random graph setting, but we obtain considerably better bounds on β(p) than can be achieved using more general techniques. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2009     

Spanning maximal planar subgraphs of random graphs

We study the threshold for the existence of a spanning maximal planar subgraph in the random graph G_{n, p} . We show that it is very near p = 1/n^? We also discuss the threshold for the existence of a spanning maximal outerplanar subgraph. This is very near p = 1/n^½.     

The thresholds for diameter 2 in random Cayley graphs

Given a group G, the model denotes the probability space of all Cayley graphs of G where each element of the generating set is chosen independently at random with probability p. In this article we show that for any and any family of groups G_k of order n_k for which , a graph with high probability has diameter at most 2 if and with high probability has diameter greater than 2 if . We also provide examples of families of graphs which show that both of these results are best possible. Of particular interest is that for some families of groups, the corresponding random Cayley graphs achieve Diameter 2 significantly faster than the Erd?s‐Renyi random graphs. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 45, 218–235, 2014     

Grids in random graphs

Threshold probabilities for the existence in a random graph on n vertices of a graph isomorphic to a given graph of order Cn and average degree at least three are investigated. In particular it is proved that the random graph G(n, p) on n vertices with edge probability contains a square grid on En/2 vertices. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Bounds on the length of a game of Cops and Robbers

In the game of Cops and Robbers, a team of cops attempts to capture a robber on a graph $G$. All players occupy vertices of $G$. The game operates in rounds; in each round the cops move to neighboring vertices, after which the robber does the same. The minimum number of cops needed to guarantee capture of a robber on $G$ is the cop number of $G$, denoted $c\left(G\right)$, and the minimum number of rounds needed for them to do so is the capture time. It has long been known that the capture time of an $n$-vertex graph with cop number $k$ is $O\left(n^{k+1}\right)$. More recently, Bonato et al. (2009) and Gaven?iak (2010) showed that for $k=1$, this upper bound is not asymptotically tight: for graphs with cop number 1, the cop can always win within $n?4$ rounds. In this paper, we show that the upper bound is tight when $k\ge 2$: for fixed $k\ge 2$, we construct arbitrarily large graphs $G$ having capture time at least ${\left(\frac{\left|V\left(G\right)\right|}{40k^4}\right)}^{k+1}$.In the process of proving our main result, we establish results that may be of independent interest. In particular, we show that the problem of deciding whether $k$ cops can capture a robber on a directed graph is polynomial-time equivalent to deciding whether $k$ cops can capture a robber on an undirected graph. As a corollary of this fact, we obtain a relatively short proof of a major conjecture of Goldstein and Reingold (1995), which was recently proved through other means (Kinnersley, 2015). We also show that $n$-vertex strongly-connected directed graphs with cop number 1 can have capture time $\Omega \left(n^2\right)$, thereby showing that the result of Bonato et al. (2009) does not extend to the directed setting.     

Biased games on random boards

In this paper we analyze biased Maker‐Breaker games and Avoider‐Enforcer games, both played on the edge set of a random board . In Maker‐Breaker games there are two players, denoted by Maker and Breaker. In each round, Maker claims one previously unclaimed edge of G and Breaker responds by claiming b previously unclaimed edges. We consider the Hamiltonicity game, the perfect matching game and the k‐vertex‐connectivity game, where Maker's goal is to build a graph which possesses the relevant property. Avoider‐Enforcer games are the reverse analogue of Maker‐Breaker games with a slight modification, where the two players claim at least 1 and at least b previously unclaimed edges per move, respectively, and Avoider aims to avoid building a graph which possesses the relevant property. Maker‐Breaker games are known to be “bias‐monotone”, that is, if Maker wins the (1,b) game, he also wins the game. Therefore, it makes sense to define the critical bias of a game, b ^*, to be the “breaking point” of the game. That is, Maker wins the (1,b) game whenever and loses otherwise. An analogous definition of the critical bias exists for Avoider‐Enforcer games: here, the critical bias of a game b ^* is such that Avoider wins the (1,b) game for every , and loses otherwise. We prove that, for every is typically such that the critical bias for all the aforementioned Maker‐Breaker games is asymptotically . We also prove that in the case , the critical bias is . These results settle a conjecture of Stojakovi? and Szabó. For Avoider‐Enforcer games, we prove that for , the critical bias for all the aforementioned games is . © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 46,651–676, 2015     

Connectivity of inhomogeneous random graphs

We find conditions for the connectivity of inhomogeneous random graphs with intermediate density. Our results generalize the classical result for G(n, p), when . We draw n independent points X_i from a general distribution on a separable metric space, and let their indices form the vertex set of a graph. An edge (i, j) is added with probability , where is a fixed kernel. We show that, under reasonably weak assumptions, the connectivity threshold of the model can be determined. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 45, 408‐420, 2014     

Extremal subgraphs of random graphs

We prove that there is a constant c > 0, such that whenever p ≥ n^‐c, with probability tending to 1 when n goes to infinity, every maximum triangle‐free subgraph of the random graph G_n,p is bipartite. This answers a question of Babai, Simonovits and Spencer (Babai et al., J Graph Theory 14 (1990) 599–622). The proof is based on a tool of independent interest: we show, for instance, that the maximum cut of almost all graphs with M edges, where M ? n and M ≤ /2, is “nearly unique”. More precisely, given a maximum cut C of G_n,M, we can obtain all maximum cuts by moving at most \begin{align*}\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n^3/M})\end{align*} vertices between the parts of C. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2012     

Semi‐random graph process

We introduce and study a novel semi‐random multigraph process, described as follows. The process starts with an empty graph on n vertices. In every round of the process, one vertex v of the graph is picked uniformly at random and independently of all previous rounds. We then choose an additional vertex (according to a strategy of our choice) and connect it by an edge to v. For various natural monotone increasing graph properties , we prove tight upper and lower bounds on the minimum (extended over the set of all possible strategies) number of rounds required by the process to obtain, with high probability, a graph that satisfies . Along the way, we show that the process is general enough to approximate (using suitable strategies) several well‐studied random graph models.