Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Davis

UC Davis Previously Published Works bannerUC Davis

Chaos forgets and remembers: Measuring information creation, destruction, and storage

Abstract

The hallmark of deterministic chaos is that it creates information - the rate being given by the Kolmogorov-Sinai metric entropy. Since its introduction half a century ago, the metric entropy has been used as a unitary quantity to measure a system's intrinsic unpredictability. Here, we show that it naturally decomposes into two structurally meaningful components: A portion of the created information - the ephemeral information - is forgotten and a portion - the bound information - is remembered. The bound information is a new kind of intrinsic computation that differs fundamentally from information creation: it measures the rate of active information storage. We show that it can be directly and accurately calculated via symbolic dynamics, revealing a hitherto unknown richness in how dynamical systems compute. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View