We propose neural network model that demonstrates the phenomenon of signal transfer between separated neuron groups via other chaotic neurons that show no apparent correlations with the input signal. The model is a recurrent neural network in which it is supposed that synchronous behavior between small groups of input and output neurons has been learned as fragments of high-dimensional memory patterns, and depletion of neural connections results in chaotic wandering dynamics. Computer experiments show that when a strong oscillatory signal is applied to an input group in the chaotic regime, the signal is successfully transferred to the corresponding output group, although no correlation is observed between the input signal and the intermediary neurons. Signal transfer is also observed when multiple signals are applied simultaneously to separate input groups belonging to different memory attractors. In this sense simultaneous multichannel communications are realized, and the chaotic neural dynamics acts as a signal transfer medium in which the signal appears to be hidden.

Chaotic dynamics introduced into a neural network model is applied to solving two-dimensional mazes, which are ill-posed problems. A moving object moves from the position at t to t + 1 by simply defined motion function calculated from firing patterns of the neural network model at each time step t . We have embedded several prototype attractors that correspond to the simple motion of the object orienting toward several directions in two-dimensional space in our neural network model. Introducing chaotic dynamics into the network gives outputs sampled from intermediate state points between embedded attractors in a state space, and these dynamics enable the object to move in various directions. System parameter switching between a chaotic and an attractor regime in the state space of the neural network enables the object to move to a set target in a two-dimensional maze. Results of computer simulations show that the success rate for this method over 300 trials is higher than that of random walk. To investigate why the proposed method gives better performance, we calculate and discuss statistical data with respect to dynamical structure.