Deterministic computation

In computer science, a deterministic computation is a computation that given an initial state of the system will always produce the same final state when given the same input.

An example of deterministic computation is a deterministic finite state machine (sometimes referred to as a deterministic finite automaton (DFA)) which is a finite state machine where for each pair of state and input symbol there is one and only one transition to a next state. DFAs recognize the set of regular languages and no other languages.

"Deterministic Computing" is also very critical when designing realtime computing systems. The system must behave with predictable latency under all operating conditions.