Editing User:Gelthor/sandbox (section)

== The idea - what is a state machine? ==

Imagine you have to build a circuit to control some kind of device. You don't have a full computer - only basic gates, and need to come up with a solution, so that your device behave the way you want it to.

The idea is, that we go over all possible things that our device can do step-by-step. We draw a circle for each of those steps and call it a '''state'''. Usually every possible output that our device can have has at least one state. We then connect this circles by arrows that have a certain condition assigned to it (called '''transitions'''). These conditions are usually a specific configuration of input signals (What shall the device do when certain inputs arrive).

This means something like that:<br>
''We go from state A to state B, when the condition on the arrow from A to B is met.''

[[File:State basic.png]]

By doing so, we can construct a picture where the complete behaviour is visible for us and we can understand it easily (= '''state machine'''). The cool thing is: There is a completely deterministic way to convert this pictures to circuits by following a few steps, and your device will do exactly what you specified in the picture. It is so straight forward, that you can technically write a program that converts state machines to circuits.