A note on the relation between Hartnell’s firefighter problem and growth of groups

Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza

doi:10.5802/tsg.314

Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza ¹

¹ Memorial University St. John’s Newfoundland A1C 5S7 (Canada)

Séminaire de théorie spectrale et géométrie, Volume 33 (2015-2016), pp. 55-60.

Abstract

The firefighter game problem on locally finite connected graphs was introduced by Bert Hartnell [6]. The game on a graph $G$ can be described as follows: let $f_{n}$ be a sequence of positive integers; an initial fire starts at a finite set of vertices; at each (integer) time $n \geq 1$ , $f_{n}$ vertices which are not on fire become protected, and then the fire spreads to all unprotected neighbors of vertices on fire; once a vertex is protected or is on fire, it remains so for all time intervals. The graph $G$ has the $f_{n}$ -containment property if every initial fire admits an strategy that protects $f_{n}$ vertices at time $n$ so that the set of vertices on fire is eventually constant. If the graph $G$ has the containment property for a sequence of the form $f_{n} = C n^{d}$ , then the graph is said to have polynomial containment. In [5], it is shown that any locally finite graph with polynomial growth has polynomial containment; and it is remarked that the converse does not hold. That article also raised the question of whether the equivalence of polynomial growth and polynomial containment holds for Cayley graphs of finitely generated groups. In this short note, we remark how the equivalence holds for elementary amenable groups and for non-amenable groups from results in the literature.

Published online: 2018-08-27

DOI: 10.5802/tsg.314

Classification: 20F65, 43A07, 57M07, 05C57, 05C10, 05C25

Author's affiliations:

Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza ¹

¹ Memorial University St. John’s Newfoundland A1C 5S7 (Canada)

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Eduardo Martínez-Pedroza. A note on the relation between Hartnell’s firefighter problem and growth of groups. Séminaire de théorie spectrale et géométrie, Volume 33 (2015-2016), pp. 55-60. doi : 10.5802/tsg.314. https://proceedings.centre-mersenne.org/articles/10.5802/tsg.314/

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