Questions tagged [pursuit-evasion]
Any puzzle where a team of pursuers must capture a team of targets, with movement limited to some given space. The goal is to find a winning strategy either for the pursuers or for the evaders.
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Catching the Vegetable-Goose [closed]
After an altercation involving giant bees, you have been sentence to some hard labour, specifically harvesting barnacle-lambs: a gourd-like fruit that grows geese in its shell
While working, you get ...
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Spiders on a cube
Two spiders are trying to catch an ant. All are constrained to move along the edges of a transparent cube. The speed of the ant is $1$. The speeds of the spiders are $v_1$ and $v_2$ respectively. What'...
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How long can you survive at the devil's playground?
The devil has trapped you in his playground.
The devil knows that you can't cross over the burning boundary of his circle, so he allows you to choose a position within the circle before he starts to ...
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1 lion, with a zebra and a fixed enclosure
Background
See the puzzle Variant of lion and 100 zebras from @ghosts-in-the-code which remains unsolved years after it was posted.
Several times in the last couple of years I've started to write up ...
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Angels & Demons (Open question)
This puzzle was given to me by a friend of mine, who in turn heard it from someone else who neglected to provide the answer. The text of the puzzle as it was given to my friend is below:
Angels ...
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Hiding Cat Puzzle on a Grid
The Youtube channel MindYourDecisions posted a video about the "Hiding Cat Puzzle". In the puzzle, you have a line of five boxes, one of which contains a cat. You don't know where the cat is, and your ...
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Hunter chasing a fox on a graph
This is a variant of the sleeping princess puzzle.
There are fifteen foxholes, connected by underground tunnels as shown below. A fox is sleeping in one of them.
Every day, a hunter checks one of ...
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Can the policeman actually catch the thief, instead of shooting?
The ACLU won a lawsuit against the Squareshire Police Department, alleging that his policy of shooting suspected thieves on sight was unconstitutionally excessive force.
The argument that carried the ...
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Can the Policeman catch the Thief?
The town of Squareshire has six streets: four sides of a square and the lines joining the midpoints of opposite sides.
$\hskip2in$
A policeman is chasing a thief along these streets. If they are ...
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Sly Cooper and the Space Police
Last Space Police question...
Sly Cooper has landed on a deserted planet with 2 policemen. He is moving around the planet, painting a line along his path, claiming any land which is surrounded by ...
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Star-Lord and the Space Police
Star-Lord is on a deserted planet along with two space policemen. If he runs into either of them, he will get immediately arrested. Fortunately for Star-Lord, somewhere on two opposite ends of the ...
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Riddick and the Space Police [duplicate]
The next problem may be way too easy, but will post it anyway.
Riddick, trying to escape from the space police, lands on a deserted
planet. How many cops should the space police send to the ...
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Lions and Zebras on a Chess Board
The black knight is our lion chasing 8 white bishop zebras which can't capture. Can the zebras evade the lion forever, if team zebra positions all the pieces and has the first turn?
Rules:
The game ...
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Game against the Devil
While browsing through S.E you notice a spider crawl right out from under your keyboard! Startled, you twitch your hand and left clicked your mouse. You look up in shock as you notice that you just ...
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Spiders and Invisible Ant on a Tetrahedron
There are three spiders and an ant on the edges of a wireframe regular tetrahedron. The spiders all move at the same speed, which is faster than that of the ant. Though the ant can always see the ...
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