The future is independent of the past given the presentThe state captures all relevant information from the historyp(st+1∣st)=p(st+1∣s1,…,st)p(s_{t+1} | s_t) = p(s_{t+1} | s_1, \dots, s_t)p(st+1∣st)=p(st+1∣s1,…,st)