The concept of deadlock

In the field of computer science, deadlock refers to a specific situation in concurrent programming, in which no progress can be made and the program becomes locked in its current state. In most cases, this phenomenon is caused by a lack of, or mishandled, coordination between different lock objects (for thread synchronization purposes). In this section, we will discuss a thought experiment commonly known as the Dining Philosophers problem, in order to illustrate the concept of deadlock and its causes; from there, you will learn how to simulate the problem in a Python concurrent program.

The Dining Philosophers problem

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...