Various systems, devices, and methods for operating on a data sequence. A system includes a set of circuits that form an input layer to receive a data sequence; first hardware computing units to transform the data sequence, the first hardware computing units connected using a set of randomly selected weights, a first hardware computing unit to: receive an input from a second hardware computing unit, determine a weight of a connection between the first and second hardware computing units using an identifier of the second hardware computing unit and a fixed random weight generator, and operate on the input using the weight to determine a state of the first hardware computing unit; and second hardware computing units to operate on states of the first computing units to generate an output based on the data sequence.