Question

Erm – what the question said. It’s something I keep hearing about, but I’ve not got round to looking into it yet.

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(updated) I could look up the definition… but why not (as pointed out by @erikson) get insight into your real experiences and anecdotes. Community Wiki’d incase that helps folks vote up the most insightful answer. Interesting reading so far, thanks!

Answer 1

Short answer, it is a technique that you can use to express systems with concrete states (as opposed to quantum states / probability distributions).

Quoting the Wikipedia article:

A finite state machine (FSM) or finite state automaton (plural: automata) or simply a state machine, is a model of behavior composed of a finite number of states, transitions between those states, and actions. A finite state machine is an abstract model of a machine with a primitive internal memory.

So, what does that mean to you? Put simply, it is an effective way to represent the path(s) from a starting state to the end state(s) of the system that you care about. Using regular expressions as a fairly easy to understand example, let’s look at the pattern AB+C (imagine that that plus is a superscript). I would expect to this pattern to accept strings such as ‘ABC’, ‘ABBC’, ‘ABBBC’, etc. A at the start, C at the end, some number of B’s in the middle (greater than or equal to one).

If you think about it, it’s almost easier to think about this in terms of a picture. Faking it with text (and that my parentheses are a loopback arc), you can see that A (on the left), is the starting state and C (on the right) is the end state on the right.

      _      ( )  A --> B --> C 

From FSAs, you can continue your journey into computational complexity by heading over to the land of Turing Machines.

However, you can also use state machines to represent real behaviors and systems. In my world, we use them to model certain workflow of actual people working with components that are extremely intolerant of mistakes in state order. As in, ‘A had better happen before C or there will be a very serious problem. Make that be not possible right now.’