Generating Patterns

Deterministic Patterns

Consider a set of traffic lights; the sequence of lights is red - red/amber - green - amber - red. The sequence can be pictured as a state machine, where the different states of the traffic lights follow each other.

e.g.

Notice that each state is dependent solely on the previous state, so if the lights are green, an amber light will always follow - that is, the system is deterministic. Deterministic systems are relatively easy to understand and analyse, once the transitions are fully known.