Study of a combinatorial game in graphs through Linear Programming

International audienceIn the Spy Game played on a graph G, a single spy travels the vertices of G at speed s, while multiple slow guards strive to have, at all times, one of them within distance d of that spy. In order to determine the smallest number of guards necessary for this task, we analyze the game through a Linear Programming formulation and the fractional strategies it yields for the guards. We then show the equivalence of fractional and integral strategies in trees. This allows us to design a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal strategy in this class of graphs. Using duality in Linear Programming, we also provide non-trivial bounds on the fractional guard-number of grids and torus. We believe that the approach using fractional relaxation and Linear Programming is promising to obtain new results in the field of combinatorial games