One Pager Cheat Sheet

• State machines, composed of States, Transitions, and Events, are mechanisms used to program a machine's response to a set of conditions and transition it from one state to another, illustrated in the example of an AC.
• Yes, a state machine can be used to program everyday appliances, by defining states, transitions, and events.
• A state machine is a logical system based on states, inputs, and transitions that can be used to program everyday appliances without requiring any actual data or signal transmission.
• The output of Meley and Moore state machines differs based on when they produce output - Meley when transitioning between states and Moore when entering and remaining in states.
• Meley state machines produce output during a transition between states, whereas Moore state machines produce output when entering or remaining in a state.
• Harel state charts enable hierarchy, parallelism, and broadcasting to be represented on the same diagram, allowing for more levels of abstraction than Meley and Moore state machines.
• Acceptors are state machines that accept or reject some form of input, like a sequence of characters or tokens, by changing states and producing either a binaries output (such as even/odd) or n-ary output (e.g. classify the input into distinct classes).
• A fail state is always present in state machines, even if it is not explicitly labeled, and can be entered if an invalid character is received.
• The Acceptor will verify and confirm that an email is from a trusted domain, allowing it to pass if it is genuine or alerting the user if not.
• A Deterministic finite state machine (DFSM) is a state machine that always gives the same output for the same input, while all other state machines are non-deterministic (NDFSM).
• DFSMs cannot transition between states without epsilon input, unlike NDFSMs, which can transition without any input.
• A deterministic state machine will always transition from the same set of inputs to the same state, whereas a non-deterministic state machine can transition to different states for the same set of inputs.
• If the output of a state machine is not determined by the input due to the possibility of multiple states being transitioned to, then the machine is considered non-deterministic.
• This code example demonstrates how a state machine with a hash map can be implemented, with states corresponding to circles and transitions corresponding to arrows on a diagram.
• Applications of state machines can provide various benefits, such as language definition and analysis, game development, programming electronics, and UI programming, which can be used to detect valid input or switch between states such as Idle, Walk, Run, and Jump.