# Reservoir Computing using Cellular Automata

Reservoir Computing based on Elementary Cellular Automata (ECA) has been recently introduced. Dubbed as ReCA [1][2] it proposed the advantage of storing the reservoir states as binary data. Less parameter tuning represents another advantage of this model. The architecture implemented in ReservoirComputing.jl follows [3] which build over the original implementation, improving the results. It is strongly suggested to go through the paper to get a solid understanding of the model before delving into experimentation with the code.

To showcase how to use this models this page illustrates the performance of ReCA in the 5 bit memory task [4]. The script for the example and companion data can be found here.

The data can be read as follows:

using DelimitedFiles

output = readdlm("./5bitoutput.txt", ',', Bool)

To use a ReCA model it is necessary to define the rule one intends to use. To do so ReservoirComputing.jl leverages CellularAutomata.jl that needs to be called as well to define the RECA struct:

using ReservoirComputing, CellularAutomata

ca = DCA(90)

To define the ReCA model it suffices to call:

reca = RECA(input, ca;
generations = 16,
input_encoding = RandomMapping(16, 40))

After the training can be performed with the chosen method.

output_layer = train(reca, output, StandardRidge(0.00001))

The prediction in this case will be a Predictive() with the input data equal to the training data. In addition, to test the 5 bit memory task, a conversion from Float to Bool is necessary:

prediction = reca(Predictive(input), output_layer)
final_pred = convert(AbstractArray{Bool}, prediction .> 0.5)

final_pred == output
true
• 1Yilmaz, Ozgur. "Reservoir computing using cellular automata." arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.0162 (2014).
• 2Margem, Mrwan, and Ozgür Yilmaz. "An experimental study on cellular automata reservoir in pathological sequence learning tasks." (2017).
• 3Nichele, Stefano, and Andreas Molund. "Deep reservoir computing using cellular automata." arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.02806 (2017).
• 4Hochreiter, Sepp, and Jürgen Schmidhuber. "Long short-term memory." Neural computation 9.8 (1997): 1735-1780.