In the study of nonlinear physical systems, one encounters apparently random or chaotic behavior, although the systems may be completely deterministic. Applying techniques from symbolic dynamics to maps of the interval, we compute two measures of chaotic behavior commonly employed in dynamical systems theory: the topological and metric entropies. For the quadratic logistic equation, we find that the metric entropy converges very slowly in comparison to maps which are strictly hyperbolic. The effects of finite precision arithmetric and external noise on chaotic behavior are characterized with the symbolic dynamics entropies. Finally, we discuss the relationship of these measures of chaos to algorithmic complexity, and use algorithmic information theory as a framework to discuss the construction of models for chaotic dynamics.