Modeling of Coupled Chaotic Oscillators

Chaotic dynamics may impose severe limits to deterministic modeling by dynamical equations of natural systems. We give theoretical argument that severe modeling difficulties may occur for high-dimensional chaotic systems in the sense that no model is able to produce reasonably long solutions that are realized by nature. We make these ideas concrete by investigating systems of coupled chaotic oscillators. They arise in many situations of physical and biological interests, and they also arise from discretization of nonlinear partial differential equations. copyright 1999 The American Physical Society