State

What state are you in?

States are used to describe the conditions of a thing. In other words, if the state of an object is given, you can tell everything that you care about it. For example, for a ball, you may only care about its position and its velocity. But for a knife, you would also want to know where the blade faces in order to know if it’s going to hurt you. That is, the position and velocity is a ball’s state, while the state of a knife may be an additional info stored in state.

State in deep learning.

In deep learning, everything is modelled by a set of numbers (tensors). States are no exception. A state is often observed by a model as a tensor, and we call this tensor observation.