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5. PRACTICAL PROBLEMS

Referring to the paradigmatic example of equation (3), we can now see that the parameter interval 1 < a < 4 is made up of a one-dimensional mosaic of infinitely many windows of a-values, in each of which a unique cycle of period k, or one of its harmonics, attracts essentially all initial points. Of these windows, that for 1 < a < 3.5700 . . corresponding to k = 1 and its harmonics is by far the widest and most conspicuous. Beyond the first point of accumulation, it can be seen from Table 3 that these windows are narrow, even for cycles of quite low periods, and the windows rapidly become very tiny as k increases.

As a result, there develops a dichotomy between the underlying mathematical behaviour (which is exactly determinable) and the "commonsense" conclusions that one would draw from numerical simulations. If the parameter a is held constant at one value in the chaotic region, and equation (3) iterated for an arbitrarily large number of generations, a density plot of the observed values of Xt on the interval 0 to 1 will settle into k equal spikes (more precisely, delta functions) corresponding to the k points on the stable cycle appropriate to this a-value. But for most a-values this cycle will have a fairly large period, and moreover it will typically take many thousands of generations before the transients associated with the initial conditions are damped out: thus the density plot produced by numerical simulations usually looks like a sample of points taken from some continuous distribution.

An especially interesting set of numerical computations are due to Hoppensteadt (personal communication) who has combined many iterations to produce a density plot of Xt for each one of a sequence of a-values, gradually increasing from 3.5700 . . to 4. These results are displayed as a movie. As can be expected from Table 3, some of the more conspicuous cycles do show up as sets of delta functions: the 3-cycle and its first few harmonics; the first 5-cycle; the first 6-cycle. But for most values of a the density plot looks like the sample function of a random process. This is particularly true in the neighbourhood of the a-value where the first odd cycle appears (a = 3.6786..), and again in the neighbourhood of a = 4: this is not surprising, because each of these locations is a point of accumulation of points of accumulation. Despite the underlying discontinuous changes in the periodicities of the stable cycles, the observed density pattern tends to vary smoothly. For example, as a increases toward the value at which the 3-cycle appears, the density plot tends to concentrate around three points, and it smoothly diffuses away from these three points after the 3-cycle and all its harmonics become unstable.

I think the most interesting mathematical problem lies in designing a way to construct some approximate and "effectively continuous" density spectrum, despite the fact that the exact density function is determinable and is always a set of delta functions. Perhaps such techniques have already been developed in ergodic theory 33 (which lies at the foundations of statistical mechanics), as for example in the use of "coarse-grained observers". I do not know.

Such an effectively stochastic description of the dynamical properties of equation (4) for large r has been provided 28, albeit by tactical tricks peculiar to that equation rather than by any general method. As r increases beyond about 3, the trajectories generated by this equation are, to an increasingly good approximation, almost periodic with period (1 / r) exp(r - 1).

The opinion I am airing in this section is that although the exquisite fine structure of the chaotic regime is mathematically fascinating, it is irrelevant for most practical purposes. What seems called for is some effectively stochastic description of the deterministic dynamics. Whereas the various statements about the different cycles and their order of appearance can be made in generic fashion, such stochastic description of the actual dynamics will be quite different for different F(X): witness the difference between the behaviour of equation (4), which for large r is almost periodic "outbreaks" spaced many generations apart, versus the behaviour of equation (3), which for a -> 4 is not very different from a series of Bernoulli coin flips.

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