The Cat and the Noisy Mouse

Abstract: We consider a variant of a pursuit and evasion game studied independently by Britnell and Wildon as well as Haslegrave. In their game, a cat has to catch an invisible mouse that moves along the edges of some graph $G$. In our version, the cat receives partial information about its distance to the mouse, and we show that the cat has a winning strategy if and only if $G$ is a forest. Seager proposed a similar game with complete distance information whose rules cause some small yet important differences to the game we consider.