Necessary and Sufficient Reservoir Condition for Universal Reservoir Computing

We discuss necessary and sufficient conditions for universal approximation using reservoir computing. Reservoir computing is a machine learning method used to train a dynamical system model by tuning only the static part of the model. The universality is the ability of the model to approximate any dynamical system with any precision. In the previous studies, we provided two sufficient conditions for the universality. We employed the universality definition that has been discussed since the earliest studies on reservoir computing. In this present paper, we prove that these two conditions and the universality are equivalent to one another. Using this equivalence, we show that a universal model must have a “pathological” property that can only be achieved or approached by chaotic reservoirs.