The Dining Philosophers problem was first introduced by Edgar Dijkstra (who, as you learned in Chapter 8, Advanced Introduction to Concurrent and Parallel Programming was a leading pioneer in concurrent programming) in 1965. The problem was first demonstrated using different technical terms (resource contention in computer systems), and was later rephrased by Tony Hoare, a British computer scientist and the inventor of the quicksort sorting algorithm. The problem statement is as follows.
Five philosophers sit around a table, and each has a bowl of food in front of them. Placed between these five bowls of food are five forks, so each philosopher has a fork on their left side, and one on their right side. This ...
