The concept of deadlocks
In concurrent programming, a deadlock refers to a specific situation 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, to illustrate the concept of a 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, a leading pioneer in concurrent programming, in 1965. This 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...
