Consider a Clock. There is a state where the Clock is 1:00 am, and one where it reads 1:01 am, and one where it reads 1:02 am, and so on. This approach would make an enormous, not very useful, state machine, with at least 720 states. If we went to seconds and modeled a 24-hour Clock, we would have 86,400 states. All of them nearly the same. For a Clock, instead, we might want to have the possible states of Running, Stopped, BeingSet, AlarmSetOn, 24HourModeOn, and Ringing