I spent part of the sunday solving the Dining Philosophers using Go. The given solution is based in the description for the problem present in The Little Book of Semaphores:
The Dining Philosophers Problem was proposed by Dijkstra in 1965, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. It appears in a number of variations, but the standard features are a table with five plates, five forks (or chopsticks) and a big bowl of spaghetti.
There are some constraints:
- Only one philosopher can hold a fork at a time
- It must be impossible for a deadlock to occur
- It must be impossible for a philosopher to starve waiting for a fork
- It must be possible for more than one philosopher to eat at the same time