Algorithms for Rigorous Entropy Bounds and Symbolic Dynamics

NO‡ Abstract. The aim of this paper is to introduce a method for computing rigorous lower bounds for topological entropy. The topological entropy of a dynamical system measures the number of trajectories that separate in finite time and quantifies the complexity of the system. Our method relies on extending existing computational Conley index techniques for constructing semi-conjugate symbolic dynamical systems. Besides o!ering a description of the dynamics, the constructed symbol system allows for the computation of a lower bound for the topological entropy of the original system. Our overall goal is to construct symbolic dynamics that yield a high lower bound for entropy. The method described in this paper is algorithmic and, although it is computational, yields mathematically rigorous results. For illustration, we apply the method to the Henon map, where we compute a rigorous lower bound for topological entropy of 0.4320.