estate

n 1: all of your assets (whether real or personal property) and

liabilities

2: extensive landed property (especially in the country)

retained by the owner for his own use; "the family owned a

large estate on Long Island" [syn: {land}, {landed estate},

{acres}, {demesne}]

3: a major social class or order of persons regarded

collectively as part of the body politic of the country

and formerly possessing distinct political rights [syn: {estate

of the realm}]

state

How something is; its

configuration, attributes, condition, or information content.

The state of a system is usually temporary (i.e. it changes

with time) and volatile (i.e. it will be lost or reset to some

initial state if the system is switched off).

A state may be considered to be a point in some {space} of all

possible states. A simple example is a light, which is either

on or off. A complex example is the electrical activation in

a human brain while solving a problem.

In computing and related fields, states, as in the light

example, are often modelled as being {discrete} (rather than

continuous) and the transition from one state to another is

considered to be instantaneous. Another (related) property of

a system is the number of possible states it may exhibit.

This may be finite or infinite. A common model for a system

with a finite number of discrete state is a {finite state

machine}.

[{Jargon File}]

(1996-10-13)