# Shared state

Data that more than one task reads or writes. Shared mutable state is what turns a parallel run into a race condition.

Source: https://university.eugo.io/glossary/shared-state

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Where state genuinely must be shared, an actor gives you one owner for it rather than many uncoordinated writers.

## Related terms

- [Actor](https://university.eugo.io/glossary/actor) — A distributed object that holds state across many calls. Created by applying the distribute decorator to a class rather than a function.
- [Task](https://university.eugo.io/glossary/task) — One unit of distributed work: a single call to a function decorated with the distribute decorator. Tasks are stateless, so each call starts fresh.