Authors: Alizée Gagnon ¹; Alexander Hassler ²; Jerry Huang ³; Aaron Krim-Yee ⁴; Fionn Mc Inerney ⁵; Andrés Zacarías ⁶; Ben Seamone ^7,1; Virgélot Virgile ⁸

• 1 Département d'Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle [Montreal]
• 2 Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain
• 3 David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
• 4 McGill University = Université McGill [Montréal, Canada]
• 5 Combinatorics, Optimization and Algorithms for Telecommunications
• 6 Instituto de Matematicas [México]
• 7 Dawson College
• 8 University of Victoria [Canada]

In the eternal domination game, an attacker attacks a vertex at each turn and a team of guards must move a guard to the attacked vertex to defend it. The guards may only move to adjacent vertices and no more than one guard may occupy a vertex. The goal is to determine the eternal domination number of a graph which is the minimum number of guards required to defend the graph against an infinite sequence of attacks. In this paper, we continue the study of the eternal domination game on strong grids. Cartesian grids have been vastly studied with tight bounds for small grids such as 2×n, 3×n, 4×n, and 5×n grids, and recently it was proven in [Lamprou et al., CIAC 2017, 393-404] that the eternal domination number of these grids in general is within O(m + n) of their domination number which lower bounds the eternal domination number. Recently, Finbow et al. proved that the eternal domination number of strong grids is upper bounded by mn 6 + O(m + n). We adapt the techniques of [Lamprou et al., CIAC 2017, 393-404] to prove that the eternal domination number of strong grids is upper bounded by mn 7 + O(m + n). While this does not improve upon a recently announced bound of ⎡m/3⎤ x⎡n/3⎤ + O(m √ n) [Mc Inerney, Nisse, Pérennes, HAL archives, 2018; Mc Inerney, Nisse, Pérennes, CIAC 2019] in the general case, we show that our bound is an improvement in the case where the smaller of the two dimensions is at most 6179.

• 05C57 - Games on graphs (graph-theoretic aspects)
• 05C69 - Vertex subsets with special properties (dominating sets, independent sets, cliques, etc.)
• 91A43 - Games involving graphs
• 91A46 - Combinatorial games