Reservoir computing with a chaotic circuit

Reservoir Computing has been highlighted as a promising methodology to perform computation in dynamical systems. This makes Reservoir Computing particularly interesting for exploiting physical systems directly as computing substrates, where the computation happens “for free” in the rich physical domain. In this work we consider a simple chaotic circuit as a reservoir: the Driven Chua’s circuit. Its rich variety of available dynamics makes it versatile as a reservoir. At the same time, its simplicity offers insight into what physical properties can be useful for computation. We demonstrate both through simulation and in-circuit experiments, that such a simple circuit can be readily exploited for computation. Our results show excellent performance on two non-temporal tasks. The fact that such a simple nonlinear circuit can be used, suggests that a wide variety of physical systems can be viewed as potential reservoirs.