GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY OF STRANGE SETS

Chaotic dynamical systems can be organized around an underlying strange set, which is comprised of all the unstable periodic orbits. In this paper, we quantify the complexity of such an organization; this complexity addresses the difficulty of predicting the structure of the strange set from low-order data and is independent of the entropy and the algorithmic complexity. We refer to the new measure as the grammatical complexity. The notion is introduced, discussed, and illustrated in the context of simple dynamical systems. In addition, the grammatical complexity is generalized to include metric properties arising due to the nonuniform distribution of the invariant measure on the strange set. © 1990 The American Physical Society.