State machines are graphical representations of a problem, decomposed into chunks of smaller operations or processes. These smaller operations then communicate with each other either in series or in parallel and in a certain order to accomplish the problem at hand. State machines are fundamental concepts in computer science and are used to solve complex systems by spending more time solving the problem visually than coding.
Let's see how our waiter robot analogy is represented via a state machine:
State machine representation of our analogy
The circled components are robot states. These states are the ones in ...
