Reservoir computing based on solitary-like waves dynamics of liquid film flows: A proof of concept

- Several theoretical works have shown that solitons -waves that self-maintain con-stant shape and velocity as they propagate- can be used as a physical computational reservoir, a concept where machine learning algorithms designed for digital computers are replaced by analog physical systems that exhibit nonlinear dynamical behaviour. Here we propose and experimentally validate a novel reservoir computing (RC) system that for the first time employs solitary-like (SL) waves propagating on the surface of a liquid film flowing over an inclined surface. We demonstrate the ability of the SL wave RC system (SLRC) to forecast chaotic time series, also producing exper-imental evidence of the possibility to combine RC with nonlinear vector autoregression techniques not only in a computer program but also in a physical system. Copyright (C) 2023 EPLA