new_blog/posts/fsm.md

title	description	date	draft	tags
The Humble Finite State Machine	Finite state machines are somewhat underrated	2026-05-01	true

Finite state machines (really finite state transducers or mealy machines) are very useful for the simple reason that they are a good model for the mechanism(s) you use to process a log of events to achieve some outcome.

Prior Writing

Reading that title I expect roughly one of three responses.

1. What's a Finite State machine
2. Oh a post about something we talked about in the class that brought up Turing Machines in university, aren't these equivalent to Regex?
3. Finite state machines are neat for (insert use case) I wonder what this guy has to say about them

The third group maybe being subdivided between people whose use case seems niche and whose use case is clearly not niche.

What are Finite state machines

Why I consider them useful