The Robot Crawler Number of a Graph

Anthony Bonato, Rita M. del Río-Chanona, Calum MacRury, Jake Nicolaidis, Xavier Pérez-Giménez, Pawel Pralat, Kirill Ternovsky

Abstract: Information gathering by crawlers on the web is of practical interest. We consider a simplified model for crawling complex networks such as the web graph, which is a variation of the robot vacuum edge-cleaning process of Messinger and Nowakowski. In our model, a crawler visits nodes via a deterministic walk determined by their weightings which change during the process deterministically. The minimum, maximum, and average time for the robot crawler to visit all the nodes of a graph is considered on various graph classes such as trees, multi-partite graphs, binomial random graphs, and graphs generated by the preferential attachment model.