Do numerical orbits of chaotic dynamical processes represent true orbits? (Q1099932)

This paper deals with the question of numerical (noisy) orbits of a chaotic dynamical process representing a true orbit. For uniformly hyperbolic systems, noisy orbits indeed stay close to a true orbit (shadow) for all time. The current paper is a discussion of the results of typical chaotic processes which violate uniform hyperbolicity. It is demonstrated that noisy orbits can typically be shadowed by true orbits for long time periods. The computational work is carried out on a Cray X- MP machine. The first part of the paper deals with one-dimensional shadowing for the logistic map \(f(x)=ax(1-x)\) where \(a=3.8\) and the orbit length is 10 7. For an initial orbit point.4, it is demonstrated that a noisy orbit can be shadowed by a true orbit within a shadowing distance of \(10^{-8}\). An important conjecture is stated: given a noise amplitude, one can expect to find a shadowing distance smaller than \(\sqrt{\delta}\) for an approximate chaotic orbit length of 1/\(\sqrt{\delta}\). Similar shadowing results are established for the two-dimensional Henon map.