Measuring the strangeness of strange attractors (Q1076387)

The authors consider the question of which observables may be effectively used to distinguish chaos and random noise in a dynamical system possessing a strange attractor. After briefly reviewing some such quantities (fractal dimension, Lyapunov exponents information entropy), the authors suggest another such measure, the correlation exponent. This exponent is closely related to the above quantities, but its computation is considerably easier. The authors then describe this exponent in a variety of examples.