11.4: Dining Philosopher Problem

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In computer science, the dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them.

It was originally formulated in 1965 by Edsger Dijkstra as a student exam exercise, presented in terms of computers competing for access to tape drive peripherals.

Problem statement

Five silent philosophers sit at a round table with bowls of spaghetti. Forks are placed between each pair of adjacent philosophers.

Each philosopher must alternately think and eat. However, a philosopher can only eat spaghetti when they have 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 is not being used by another philosopher. After an individual philosopher finishes eating, they need to put down both forks so that the forks become available to others. A philosopher can only take the fork on their right or the one on their left as they become available and they cannot start eating before getting both forks.

Eating is not limited by the remaining amounts of spaghetti or stomach space; an infinite supply and an infinite demand are assumed.

The problem is how to design a discipline of behavior (a concurrent algorithm) such that no philosopher will starve; i.e., each can forever continue to alternate between eating and thinking, assuming that no philosopher can know when others may want to eat or think.

Problems

The problem was designed to illustrate the challenges of avoiding deadlock, a system state in which no progress is possible. To see that a proper solution to this problem is not obvious, consider a proposal in which each philosopher is instructed to behave as follows:

think until the left fork is available; when it is, pick it up;
think until the right fork is available; when it is, pick it up;
when both forks are held, eat for a fixed amount of time;
then, put the right fork down;
then, put the left fork down;
repeat from the beginning.

This attempted solution fails because it allows the system to reach a deadlock state, in which no progress is possible. This is a state in which each philosopher has picked up the fork to the left, and is waiting for the fork to the right to become available. With the given instructions, this state can be reached, and when it is reached, each philosopher will eternally wait for another (the one to the right) to release a fork.^[4]

Resource starvation might also occur independently of deadlock if a particular philosopher is unable to acquire both forks because of a timing problem. For example, there might be a rule that the philosophers put down a fork after waiting ten minutes for the other fork to become available and wait a further ten minutes before making their next attempt. This scheme eliminates the possibility of deadlock (the system can always advance to a different state) but still suffers from the problem of livelock. If all five philosophers appear in the dining room at exactly the same time and each picks up the left fork at the same time the philosophers will wait ten minutes until they all put their forks down and then wait a further ten minutes before they all pick them up again.

Mutual exclusion is the basic idea of the problem; the dining philosophers create a generic and abstract scenario useful for explaining issues of this type. The failures these philosophers may experience are analogous to the difficulties that arise in real computer programming when multiple programs need exclusive access to shared resources. These issues are studied in concurrent programming. The original problems of Dijkstra were related to external devices like tape drives. However, the difficulties exemplified by the dining philosophers problem arise far more often when multiple processes access sets of data that are being updated. Complex systems such as operating system kernels use thousands of locks and synchronizations that require strict adherence to methods and protocols if such problems as deadlock, starvation, and data corruption are to be avoided.

Resource hierarchy solution

This solution to the problem is the one originally proposed by Dijkstra. It assigns a partial order to the resources (the forks, in this case), and establishes the convention that all resources will be requested in order, and that no two resources unrelated by order will ever be used by a single unit of work at the same time. Here, the resources (forks) will be numbered 1 through 5 and each unit of work (philosopher) will always pick up the lower-numbered fork first, and then the higher-numbered fork, from among the two forks they plan to use. The order in which each philosopher puts down the forks does not matter. In this case, if four of the five philosophers simultaneously pick up their lower-numbered fork, only the highest-numbered fork will remain on the table, so the fifth philosopher will not be able to pick up any fork. Moreover, only one philosopher will have access to that highest-numbered fork, so he will be able to eat using two forks.

While the resource hierarchy solution avoids deadlocks, it is not always practical, especially when the list of required resources is not completely known in advance. For example, if a unit of work holds resources 3 and 5 and then determines it needs resource 2, it must release 5, then 3 before acquiring 2, and then it must re-acquire 3 and 5 in that order. Computer programs that access large numbers of database records would not run efficiently if they were required to release all higher-numbered records before accessing a new record, making the method impractical for that purpose.

The resource hierarchy solution is not fair. If philosopher 1 is slow to take a fork, and if philosopher 2 is quick to think and pick its forks back up, then philosopher 1 will never get to pick up both forks. A fair solution must guarantee that each philosopher will eventually eat, no matter how slowly that philosopher moves relative to the others.

Arbitrator solution

Another approach is to guarantee that a philosopher can only pick up both forks or none by introducing an arbitrator, e.g., a waiter. In order to pick up the forks, a philosopher must ask permission of the waiter. The waiter gives permission to only one philosopher at a time until the philosopher has picked up both of their forks. Putting down a fork is always allowed. The waiter can be implemented as a mutex. In addition to introducing a new central entity (the waiter), this approach can result in reduced parallelism: if a philosopher is eating and one of his neighbors is requesting the forks, all other philosophers must wait until this request has been fulfilled even if forks for them are still available.

Adapted from:
"Dining philosophers problem" by Multiple Contributors, Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0