  We introduce a novel framework of reservoir computing, that is capable of
both connectionist machine intelligence and symbolic computation. Cellular
automaton is used as the reservoir of dynamical systems. Input is randomly
projected onto the initial conditions of automaton cells and nonlinear
computation is performed on the input via application of a rule in the
automaton for a period of time. The evolution of the automaton creates a
space-time volume of the automaton state space, and it is used as the
reservoir. The proposed framework is capable of long short-term memory and it
requires orders of magnitude less computation compared to Echo State Networks.
We prove that cellular automaton reservoir holds a distributed representation
of attribute statistics, which provides a more effective computation than local
representation. It is possible to estimate the kernel for linear cellular
automata via metric learning, that enables a much more efficient distance
computation in support vector machine framework. Also, binary reservoir feature
vectors can be combined using Boolean operations as in hyperdimensional
computing, paving a direct way for concept building and symbolic processing.
