In the context of random amenable group actions, we introduce the notions of random upper metric mean dimension with potentials and the random upper measure-theoretical metric mean dimension. Besides, we establish a variational principle for the random upper metric mean dimensions. At the end, we study the equilibrium state for random upper metric mean dimensions.

We consider continuous free semigroup actions generated by a family $(g_y)_{y \,\in \, Y}$ of continuous endomorphisms of a compact metric space $(X,d)$ , subject to a random walk $\mathbb P_\nu =\nu ^{\mathbb N}$ defined on a shift space $Y^{\mathbb N}$ , where $(Y, d_Y)$ is a compact metric space with finite upper box dimension and $\nu $ is a Borel probability measure on Y. With the aim of elucidating the impact of the random walk on the metric mean dimension, we prove a variational principle which relates the metric mean dimension of the semigroup action with the corresponding notions for the associated skew product and the shift map $\sigma $ on $Y^{\mathbb {N}}$ , and compare them with the upper box dimension of Y. In particular, we obtain exact formulas whenever $\nu $ is homogeneous and has full support. We also discuss several examples to enlighten the roles of the homogeneity, of the support and of the upper box dimension of the measure $\nu $ , and to test the scope of our results.

We prove that for $C^0$ -generic homeomorphisms, acting on a compact smooth boundaryless manifold with dimension greater than one, the upper metric mean dimension with respect to the smooth metric coincides with the dimension of the manifold. As an application, we show that the upper box dimension of the set of periodic points of a $C^0$ -generic homeomorphism is equal to the dimension of the manifold. In the case of continuous interval maps, we prove that each level set for the metric mean dimension with respect to the Euclidean distance is $C^0$ -dense in the space of continuous endomorphisms of $[0,1]$ with the uniform topology. Moreover, the maximum value is attained at a $C^0$ -generic subset of continuous interval maps and a dense subset of metrics topologically equivalent to the Euclidean distance.

We study the rotation sets for homeomorphisms homotopic to the identity on the torus $\mathbb T^d$ , $d\ge 2$ . In the conservative setting, we prove that there exists a Baire residual subset of the set $\text {Homeo}_{0, \lambda }(\mathbb T^2)$ of conservative homeomorphisms homotopic to the identity so that the set of points with wild pointwise rotation set is a Baire residual subset in $\mathbb T^2$ , and that it carries full topological pressure and full metric mean dimension. Moreover, we prove that for every $d\ge 2$ the rotation set of $C^0$ -generic conservative homeomorphisms on $\mathbb T^d$ is convex. Related results are obtained in the case of dissipative homeomorphisms on tori. The previous results rely on the description of the topological complexity of the set of points with wild historic behavior and on the denseness of periodic measures for continuous maps with the gluing orbit property.

Furstenberg [Disjointness in ergodic theory, minimal sets, and a problem in Diophantine approximation. Math. Syst. Theory1 (1967), 1–49] calculated the Hausdorff and Minkowski dimensions of one-sided subshifts in terms of topological entropy. We generalize this to $\mathbb{Z}^{2}$-subshifts. Our generalization involves mean dimension theory. We calculate the metric mean dimension and the mean Hausdorff dimension of $\mathbb{Z}^{2}$-subshifts with respect to a subaction of $\mathbb{Z}$. The resulting formula is quite analogous to Furstenberg’s theorem. We also calculate the rate distortion dimension of $\mathbb{Z}^{2}$-subshifts in terms of Kolmogorov–Sinai entropy.