On 2011-07-19, Matty Sarro wrote: > Hey everyone. I am currently reading through an RFC, and it mentions > that a client and server half of a transaction are embodied by finite > state machines. I am reading through the wikipedia article for finite > state machines, and sadly it's going a bit above my head. I don't > really have a background in engineering, and would really love to > understand what is being said. Does anyone have a simple way to > explain it?
We can mathematically model a finite state machine (FSM) by a simple system characterized by three quantities: * state * input * output and two functions: * next_state_function(current_state, current_input) * output_function(current_state, current_input) The quantities' values are only defined between transitions, as we accept that their values change non-continuously at each transition "tick". Thus, at each transition the following pseudocode is run: state <- next_state_function(state, input) And at any point in time, the output satisfies the equation: output = output_function(state, input) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
