Short Term Memory and Pattern Matching with Simple Echo State Networks

Abstract

Two recently proposed approaches to recognize temporal patterns have been proposed by Jäger with the so called Echo State Network (ESN) and by Maass with the so called Liquid State Machine (LSM). The ESN approach assumes a sort of “black-box” operability of the networks and claims a broad applicability to several different problems using the same principle. Here we propose a simplified version of ESNs which we call Simple Echo State Network (SESN) which exhibits good results in memory capacity and pattern matching tasks and which allows a better understanding of the capabilities and restrictions of ESNs.