In a pursuit-evasion game, a team of pursuers attempt to capture an evader. The players alternate turns, move with equal speed, and have full information about the state of the game. We consider the most restictive capture condition: a pursuer must become colocated with the evader to win the game. We prove two general results about pursuit-evasion games in topological spaces. First, we show that one pursuer has a winning strategy in any CAT(0) space under this restrictive capture criterion. This complements a result of Alexander, Bishop and Ghrist, who provide a winning strategy for a game with positive capture radius. Second, we consider the game played in a compact domain in Euclidean two-space with piecewise analytic boundary and arbitrary Euler characteristic. We show that three pursuers always have a winning strategy by extending recent work of Bhadauria, Klein, Isler and Suri from polygonal environments to our more general setting.
Just as the proofs of were inspired by Aigner and Fromme, our proof of Theorem is inspired by those for the polygonal environment. actually give two different winning strategies for three pursuers. At a high level, these strategies progress in the same way, but the tactics for choosing paths and how to guard them are different. Herein, we adapt their shortest path strategy to our more general setting. The topological environment introduces a distinctive set of challenges to overcome. In particular, we do not have a finite set of polygonal vertices to use as a backbone for our guarded paths. Instead, we rely on homotopy classes to differentiate between paths to guard. Looking beyond the high-level structure of our pursuer strategy, the arguments (and their technical details) in this paper are wholly distinct from those found in @cite_9 , and our result applies to a much broader class of environments.
@cite_9
1976698879 2963702702 2597894505 2037034267
This paper contains two main results. First, we revisit the well-known visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem, and show that in contrast to deterministic strategies, a single pursuer can locate an unpredictable evader in any simply connected polygonal environment, using a randomized strategy. The evader can be arbitrarily faster than the pursuer, and it may know the position of the pursuer at all times, but it does not have prior knowledge of the random decisions made by the pursuer. Second, using the randomized algorithm, together with the solution to a problem called the "lion and man problem" as subroutines, we present a strategy for two pursuers (one of which is at least as fast as the evader) to quickly capture an evader in a simply connected polygonal environment. We show how this strategy can be extended to obtain a strategy for a polygonal room with a door, two pursuers who have only line-of-sight communication, and a single pursuer (at the expense of increased capture time). We prove tight upper bounds on the logarithmic derivative of the independence and matching polynomials of d-regular graphs. For independent sets, this theorem is a strengthening of Kahn's result that a disjoint union of copies of Kd;d maximizes the number of independent sets of a bipartite d-regular graph, Galvin and Tet ali's result that the independence polynomial is maximized by the same, and Zhao's extension of both results to all d-regular graphs. For matchings, this shows that the matching polynomial and the total number of matchings of a d-regular graph are maximized by a union of copies of Kd;d. Using this we prove the asymptotic upper matching conjecture of Friedland, Krop, Lundow, and Markstrom. In probabilistic language, our main theorems state that for all d-regular graphs and all �, the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model and the edge occupancy fraction of the monomer-dimer model with fugacity � are maximized by Kd;d. Our method involves constrained optimization problems over distributions of random variables and applies to all d-regular graphs directly, without a reduction to the bipartite case. Using a variant of the method we prove a lower bound on the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model on any d-regular, vertex-transitive, bipartite graph: the occupancy fraction of such a graph is strictly greater than the occupancy fraction of the unique translationinvariant hard-core measure on the infinite d-regular tree In a pursuit-evasion game, a team of pursuers attempt to capture an evader. The players alternate turns, move with equal speed, and have full information about the state of the game. We consider the most restrictive capture condition: a pursuer must become colocated with the evader to win the game. We prove two general results about this adversarial motion planning problem in geometric spaces. First, we show that one pursuer has a winning strategy in any compact CAT(0) space. This complements a result of Alexander, Bishop and Ghrist, who provide a winning strategy for a game with positive capture radius. Second, we consider the game played in a compact domain in Euclidean two-space with piecewise analytic boundary and arbitrary Euler characteristic. We show that three pursuers always have a winning strategy by extending recent work of Bhadauria, Klein, Isler and Suri from polygonal environments to our more general setting. We address the fundamental problem of goal-directed path planning in an uncertain environment represented as a probability (of occupancy) map. Most methods generally use a threshold to reduce the grayscale map to a binary map before applying off-the-shelf techniques to find the best path. This raises the somewhat ill-posed question, what is the right (optimal) value to threshold the map? We instead suggest a persistent homology approach to the problem-a topological approach in which we seek the homology class of trajectories that is most persistent for the given probability map. In other words, we want the class of trajectories that is free of obstacles over the largest range of threshold values. In order to make this problem tractable, we use homology in ℤ 2 coefficients (instead of the standard ℤ coefficients), and describe how graph search-based algorithms can be used to find trajectories in different homology classes. Our simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and practical applicability of the algorithm proposed in this paper.paper.