English

Ulam meets Turing: constructing quadratic maps with non-computable SRB measures

Dynamical Systems 2025-01-03 v1

Abstract

In 1946, S. Ulam invented Monte Carlo method, which has since become the standard numerical technique for making statistical predictions for long-term behaviour of dynamical systems. We show that this, or in fact any other numerical approach can fail for the simplest non-linear discrete dynamical systems given by the logistic maps fa(x)=ax(1x)f_{a}(x)=ax(1-x) of the unit interval. We show that there exist computable real parameters a(0,4)a\in (0,4) for which almost every orbit of faf_a has the same asymptotical statistical distribution in [0,1][0,1], but this limiting distribution is not Turing computable.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.00006,
  title  = {Ulam meets Turing: constructing quadratic maps with non-computable SRB measures},
  author = {Cristóbal Rojas and Michael Yampolsky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.00006},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1910.09625

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:52:39.231Z