Comment on "Optimal Periodic Orbits of Chaotic Systems"

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In a recent Letter, Hunt and Ott argued that SHORT-period unstable periodic orbits (UPOs) would be the invariant sets associated with a chaotic attractor that are most likely to optimize the time average of some smooth scalar performance function. In this Comment, we show that their conclusion does not hold generally and that optimal time averages may specifically require long-period UPOs. This situation can arise when long-period UPOs are able to spend substantial amounts of time in a region of phase space that is close to large values of the performance function.