Editing Dining philosophers problem (section)

===Problems===

The problem was designed to illustrate the challenges of avoiding [[deadlock (computer science)|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 unless the left fork is available; when it is, pick it up;
* think unless the right fork is available; when it is, pick it up;
* when both forks are held, eat for a fixed amount of time;
* put the left fork down;
* put the right fork down;
* repeat from the beginning.

With these instructions, the situation may arise where each philosopher holds the fork to their left; in that situation, they will all be stuck forever, waiting for the other fork to be available: it is a deadlock.

[[Resource starvation]], [[mutual exclusion]] and [[Deadlock (computer science)#Livelock|livelock]] are other types of sequence and access problems.