Problem Statement
Five silent philosophers sit at a table around a bowl of spaghetti. A fork is placed between each pair of adjacent philosophers.
Each philosopher must alternately think and eat. However, a philosopher can only eat spaghetti when he has both left and right forks. Each fork can be held by only one philosopher and so a philosopher can use the fork only if it's not being used by another philosopher. After he finishes eating, he needs to put down both the forks so they become available to others. A philosopher can grab the fork on his right or the one on his left as they become available, but can't start eating before getting both of them.
Eating is not limited by the amount of spaghetti left: assume an infinite supply. An alternative problem formulation uses rice and chopsticks instead of spaghetti and forks.
The problem is how to design a discipline of behavior (a concurrent algorithm) such that each philosopher won't starve, i.e. can forever continue to alternate between eating and thinking, assuming that any philosopher can not know when others may want to eat or think.
Read more about this topic: Dining Philosophers Problem
Famous quotes containing the words problem and/or statement:
“The problem is simply this: no one can feel like CEO of his or her life in the presence of the people who toilet trained her and spanked him when he was naughty. We may have become Masters of the Universe, accustomed to giving life and taking it away, casually ordering people into battle or out of their jobs . . . and yet we may still dirty our diapers at the sound of our mommy’s whimper or our daddy’s growl.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote ... takes on the character of divine revelation.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)