Philosophers – 42 School Project

Overview

Philosophers is a concurrency project from the 42 curriculum based on the classic synchronization problem described by Edsger W. Dijkstra: the Dining Philosophers Problem.

The objective is to simulate multiple philosophers sitting at a table, alternating between eating, thinking, and sleeping, while sharing limited resources (forks). The challenge is to coordinate access to shared resources without causing deadlocks, race conditions, or starvation.

Project Scope

The project includes:

· Creating and managing multiple threads (one per philosopher)

· Synchronizing shared resources using mutexes

· Preventing race conditions

· Avoiding deadlocks

· Detecting philosopher death based on timing constraints

· Handling precise time measurement

· Ensuring clean thread termination and memory management

Implemented in:

· C

· POSIX Threads (pthreads)

· Mutexes for synchronization

Project Focus

Philosophers focuses on:

· Understanding thread creation and lifecycle management

· Coordinating access to shared resources

· Designing synchronization strategies

· Managing concurrent state safely

· Working with timing constraints in a multithreaded environment

· Structuring deterministic behavior under concurrency

Technical Scope

The project explores fundamental concurrency concepts. It involves designing a synchronization model where philosophers compete for limited resources while ensuring the system remains stable.

Special attention is required to:

· Order of mutex locking

· Preventing circular wait conditions

· Monitoring thread state without introducing data races

· Balancing performance with correctness

The emphasis is on understanding how concurrent systems behave and how subtle timing issues can affect correctness.

Build & Run

make
./philo number_of_philosophers time_to_die time_to_eat time_to_sleep [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]