 This results in an infinite sequence on the alphabet {1,2,…"r"} which encodes the point.In general, this encoding may be imprecise (the same sequence may represent many different points) and the set of sequences which arise in this way may be difficult to describe.Under certain conditions, which are made explicit in the rigorous definition of a Markov partition, the assignment of the sequence to a point of "M" becomes an almost one-to-one map whose image is a symbolic dynamical system of a special kind called a shift of finite type.