What does state machine mean?

A program organised as a set of states and the transitions between them: in each state it does one thing, and a condition moves it to the next state.

Also written as: state machines, finite state machine

In a lesson

The program that results is called a state machine. Every washing machine, lift and traffic light is one.

Learn it

• Taught in 5.2 States Behaviours, Robot club
• Guide with live demos: Finite state machines explained

Used in

• 5.5 Brains
• 5.6 Project: rescue
• 6.3 Losing the line
• 6.8 Project: the delivery
• A6.1 Finite state machines
• A6.2 Mealy machines: FSMs with output
• A6.3 Sets
• A6.4 Regular expressions and regular languages
• A6.9 Turing machines
• A6.10 Project: the mission robot

and 2 more lessons.

All glossary terms