State machines are extremely useful in the programming  AI, but difficult to implement cleanly.  Most of the time programmers end up making a mess with rule based if-then-else or switch-case statements.  The new Cortex engine has been given an interface for all AI brains where by any given state can be encapsulated.  Only the current state of the state machine is bound to the AI brain at a given time thus giving a pure representation of the current state.  Only the code of the current state is executed and without doing tons of conditional statements to determine what that current state is.  The brain at any given time is therefore its own state and contains only the code for that state.

This not only greatly increases the speed of execution, but allows for new states to be added at later time or states to be removed entirely from the AI in real time.  Thus, it is possible in a sense for the AI to become a true Neural Network style architecture if you wanted it to be.  The code is far simpler to debug, since the brain can only contain a singular state at a time.  By giving the Cortex engine this ability it has opened it up to extreme AI capabilities.

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