I have been working with a cellular automata model and have been struggling to characterize its dynamics. It seems to be displaying aperiodic behaviour in a certain part of the parameter space, but I am really struggling to quantify/qualify this. I can't really find a definition nor, as you would expect from lack of definition, test for chaos in this system. I have found some sources that are heavy on topology which I know next to nothing about so I really have no gauge as to how promising/reliable they are (I'm on a bit of a time crunch so I want to avoid taking that detour if possible).
I found the following: http://bluebox.ippt.pan.pl/~tlipnia/docs/js_Discrete_Chaos_IEEE.pdf which was really interesting, but hasn't been that helpful since my space doesn't have a well defined metric.
Does anybody have interesting papers, ideas, resources, etc. on the subject?
Anything is appreciated (even the Topology heavy stuff for possible future readers of this post and/or myself if all else fails).
Thank you.