Deterministic meaning : Of, or relating to determinism. (of a Turing machine) Having at most one instruction associated with any given internal state. (of a system) Having exactly predictable time evolution. (of an algorithm) Having each state depend only on the immediately previous state, as opposed to having some states depend on backtracking where there may be multiple possible next actions and no way to choose between them except by trying each one and backtracking upon failure.