Finite State Automata

• An FSA is a way of describing a simple process.
• The system (whatever it is) is in one state at any given time.
• FSAs can generate but usually recognise, so depending on an input, they move to the next state.
• This is often used in video games to model agents.
• It's also parallel to Regular Languages.
• They're used for token recognisers in programming language computation.
• They're really fast.
• They're related to Hidden Markov Models. (The system learns the underlying FSA from data.)