Global and local Complexity in weakly chaotic dynamical systems

Abstract

In a topological dynamical system the complexity of an orbit is a measure of the amount of information (algorithmic information content) that is necessary to describe the orbit. This indicator is invariant up to topological conjugation. We consider this indicator of local complexity of the dynamics and provide different examples of its behavior, showing how it can be useful to characterize various kind of weakly chaotic dynamics. We also provide criteria to find systems with non trivial orbit complexity (systems where the description of the whole orbit requires an infinite amount of information). We consider also a global indicator of the complexity of the system. This global indicator generalizes the topological entropy, taking into account systems were the number of essentially different orbits increases less than exponentially. Then we prove that if the system is constructive (roughly speaking: if the map can be defined up to any given accuracy using a finite amount of information) the orbit complexity is everywhere less or equal than the generalized topological entropy. Conversely there are compact non constructive examples where the inequality is reversed, suggesting that this notion comes out naturally in this kind of complexity questions.