Dining Philosophers
Explore the Dining Philosophers problem, a classic concurrency challenge, by understanding how to use semaphores to prevent deadlocks. Learn how to model philosopher actions as threads competing for forks, and apply strategies like limiting diners or ordering fork acquisition to ensure all philosophers eat without conflict.
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Dining Philosophers
This is a classical synchronization problem proposed by Dijkstra.
Imagine you have five philosophers sitting on a roundtable. The philosopher's do only two kinds of activities. One: they contemplate, and two: they eat. However, they have only five forks between themselves to eat their food with. Each philosopher requires both the fork to his left and the fork to his right to eat his food.
The arrangement of the philosophers and the forks are shown in the diagram.
Design a solution where each philosopher gets a chance to eat his food without causing a deadlock. ...
Solution
For no deadlock to occur at all and have all the philosophers be able to eat, we would need ten forks, two for each philosopher. With five forks ...