Pursuit–evasion

game of chasing other people

1983 board game

curve traced by a pursuer chasing a pursuee

Concept in game theory

game-theoretic game on an endless chessboard: a devil hinders an angel’s movement, and the angel tries to escape; each turn the angel jumps ≤k squares, and the devil adds a block on an empty square

mathematical problem

pursuit-evasion game played by two players in a region

Pursuit–evasion (variants of which are referred to as cops and robbers and graph searching) is a family of problems in mathematics and computer science in which one group attempts to track down members of another group in an environment. Early work on problems of this type modeled the environment geometrically. In 1976, Torrence Parsons introduced a formulation whereby movement is constrained by a graph. The geometric formulation is sometimes called continuous pursuit–evasion, and the graph formulation discrete pursuit–evasion (also called graph searching). Current research is typically limite