From idle chitchat with the Duke she learned that the numbers on the drums 
were referred to as states. At first she did not know which states led to other 
states, and so she wandered aimlessly from one state to the next, recording 
the connections on scratch paper. This soon grew to a table listing some thirty-two 
different states and how the lock would respond to a one or a zero when it was 
in each of those states. It took a while for Nell to fill out all the blank 
spaces in the table, because some of the states were hard to get to—they 
could be reached only by getting the machine to write a certain series of ones 
and zeros on the chain.