On the Efficient Capture of Dangerous Criminals

President Hush1 was extremely proud of his robotics troops. The search for the notorious criminal Assuma’ Hex Loaded was proceeding fairly well, and the robotic troops on the ground were on the verge of surrounding and capturing the escapee. Compared to this, the thrill of his chief scientific advisor, who was babbling about how efficient the new capture algorithm was, seemed to President Hush rather incomprehensible. To him, what mattered was that the robots could reach and surround the enemies, making sure they could not escape, and keep them in check until the bomb squad could come and get rid of that nuisance. Of course, this tactic would cause the loss of all the robots as well, but in the end robots were expendable, did not vote, did not have a family awaiting them back home, and their loss was not necessarily a sad occurrence, in view of the needs of the arm lobby. Or at least, this was what his advisor Condoglianza kept saying him. Defense Secretary Donald Duckfield had a completely different point of view. He had always felt that the extermination of the enemy had to be performed with maximal efficiency. It was not enough to be effective, the robotic troops had to be optimal. Indeed, he had allocated 7.5 quadrillion dollars to a promising project comparing the performances of different algorithmic approaches to the problem. Of course, we could not afford to let such an important source of funding go. So, while waiting for a promised national grant of 7.5 euros, we settled to study the effectiveness of several algorithms to accomplish the desired task of reaching and surrounding an enemy unit fleeing in a hostile battlefield. This paper reports on the finding of our investigation.