  The theoretical justification of the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm depends
upon the molecular dynamics trajectories within it being exactly reversible. If
computations were carried out with exact arithmetic then it would be easy to
ensure such reversibility, but the use of approximate floating point arithmetic
inevitably introduces violations of reversibility. In the absence of evidence
to the contrary, we are usually prepared to accept that such rounding errors
can be made small enough to be innocuous, but in certain circumstances they are
exponentially amplified and lead to blatantly erroneous results. We show that
there are two types of instability of the molecular dynamics trajectories which
lead to this behavior, instabilities due to insufficiently accurate numerical
integration of Hamilton's equations, and intrinsic chaos in the underlying
continuous fictitious time equations of motion themselves. We analyze the
former for free field theory, and show that it is essentially a finite volume
effect. For the latter we propose a hypothesis as to how the Liapunov exponent
describing the chaotic behavior of the fictitious time equations of motion for
an asymptotically free quantum field theory behaves as the system is taken to
its continuum limit, and explain why this means that instabilities in molecular
dynamics trajectories are not a significant problem for Hybrid Monte Carlo
computations. We present data for pure $SU(3)$ gauge theory and for QCD with
dynamical fermions on small lattices to illustrate and confirm some of our
results.
