A Smooth Dynamical System that Counts in Binary

This paper presents a smooth dynamical system that implements a toggle flip-flop. The flip-flop is described as a system of smooth, non-linear ODE's. We identify a period-2, invariant set of this system, and show that this corresponds to the discrete state transitions of a discrete model. We show that this behaviour is robust for a large class of inputs and that these toggle elements can be composed to implement a binary counter of any number of bits.