What Is Dining Philosophers Problem?

What if you had a philosopher and a plate of spaghetti? What if you also had five other philosophers and five other dishes of spaghetti? What would happen then? Well, that's the Dining Philosopher's Problem. One day, five philosophers are sitting around a table. They need to eat, but their food is on the table in front of them to eat, each philosopher must grab a fork and use it to get food from the plate in front of them. However, the knives are placed between the dishes, and no philosopher can reach their division without getting up from their seat and moving around the table. Each philosopher has access to two divisions: one left and one right. The only way they can eat is by grabbing both forks and eating at once, but as soon as they do so, all five philosophers are stuck forever until someone else grabs both divisions again and starts eating. It is known as "The Dining Philosophers Problem". The Dining Philosopher's problem is a simple but illuminating example of a deadlock. The problem begins with five philosophers sitting around a table. Each philosopher has a fork, and all the knives are on the table. The philosophers need to eat, so they take turns picking up their division and eating with it, then putting the fork back down on the table but here's the catch: they can only pick up their knife and use it to eat! So, if any philosopher picks up another philosopher's fork, this is a deadlock—the philosophers are waiting for each other to put down their forks so they can start using them again. Still, no one can do that because someone else has already taken them! So how do we fix this? There are two ways to fix this problem: we could change how many forks there are in total (by adding more) or change who's allowed to use which knife (by changing who sits where).