Simulation of the dining philosophers problem.
In the problem, k philosophers sit around a round table with k forks.
The philosophers either think or eat.
When a philosopher thinks, he leaves the forks located to the left and right to
him on the table.
Whenever a philosopher wants to eat, he picks up the left and the right
fork from the table, provided that no other philosopher is using them.
This situation can lead to a deadlock when all philosophers hold one fork from
the same direction (left or right) at the same time using naive synchronization.
As a result, all philosophers starve, since they need both forks to eat.
This program implements the situation described above.
In addition to these standard philosophers, it implements wise philosophers
whose behavior cannot lead to a deadlock.
A wise philosopher picks up the forks in a different order than his neighbors.
If the neighbors of a philosopher pick up the left fork first, the wise philosopher
will pick up the right fork first and vice versa.
This is my solution of an assignment in the course CS511 (Concurrent Programming) at Stevens Institute of Technology in the Fall of 2012.
The constant WISE PHILOSOPHER in DiningPhilosophers.java allows to switch
between wise and standard philosophers.
Create a JAR archive and start the simulation with the command
java -jar WiseDiningPhilosophers.jar k l h e
where
kdenotes the number of philosopherslis the minimum thinking time of a philosopher in milliseconds.his the maximum thinking time of a philosopher in milliseconds. The thinking time is chosen uniformly at random out of the interval [l,h].eis the eating time in milliseconds.
(Copyright) 2012 Fabian Foerg