Sivaraman's cop-number conjecture for path-free graphs

From papers

Let PkP_k denote the path on kk vertices, let GG be a graph, and let c(G)c(G) denote its cop number. A graph is PkP_k-free if it contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to PkP_k. Sivaraman's conjecture. For all k5k\geq 5, if GG is PkP_k-free, then

c(G)k3.c(G)\leq k-3.

The conjecture proposes an improvement over the known bound that every connected PkP_k-free graph is (k2)(k-2)-cop win. Its general P5P_5 case was recently proved by Chudnovsky, Norin, Seymour, and Turcotte; the statement for general kk is therefore not uniformly open in the same form.

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Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Alexander Clow and Erin Meger, “Cops and Robbers on Graphs with Path Constraints”, arXiv:2509.10941 (2025).

Additional references

9 papers in this index state this conjecture (2019–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2505.15416, arXiv:2504.04496, arXiv:2504.14863, arXiv:2302.06800, arXiv:2104.02807, arXiv:2001.03124, arXiv:1908.11478, arXiv:1903.11484.

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