Input-anticipating critical reservoirs show power law forgetting of unexpected input events

Usually reservoir computing shows an exponential memory decay. This letter investigates under which circumstances echo state networks can show a power law forgetting. That means traces of earlier events can be found in the reservoir for very long time spans. Such a setting requires critical connectivity exactly at the limit of what is permissible according to the echo state condition. However, for general matrices, the limit cannot be determined exactly from theory. In addition, the behavior of the network is strongly influenced by the input flow. Results are presented that use certain types of restricted recurrent connectivity and anticipation learning with regard to the input, where power law forgetting can indeed be achieved.