Noninvertibility and the structure of basins of attraction in a model adaptive control system

Summary We present a two-dimensional, nonlinear map, arising from a simple adaptive control problem, which exhibits disconnected boundaries separating the basins of attraction of its coexisting attractors. We perform a detailed study of the relation between this phenomenon and the noninvertible nature of the map and demonstrate how the complex basin structure is caused by a change in the number of preimages of points along a stable manifold.