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by YorkshireSeason 2622 days ago
If you are not already intimately familiar with them learn about FSA (= finite state automata), aka FSM (finite state machines).

Most interesting facts about Markov chains (e.g. the Stationary Distribution Theorem) really are probabilistic generalisations of simpler facts about FSAs (e.g. FSAs cannot be used to "count"). In my experience, understanding them first for FSAs and then seeing how they generalise for the probabilitic case is a good way of approaching this subject.