Philosophers

Philosophers is a 42 school project that introduces the basics of threading a process. You will learn how to create threads and discover mutexes.

The Dining Philosophers Problem

• One or more philosophers sit at a round table.
• There is a large bowl of spaghetti in the middle of the table.
• The philosophers alternatively eat, think, or sleep.
• While they are eating, they are not thinking nor sleeping;
• While thinking, they are not eating nor sleeping;
• And, of course, while sleeping, they are not eating nor thinking.
• There are also forks on the table. There are as many forks as philosophers.
• Because serving and eating spaghetti with only one fork is very inconvenient, a philosopher takes their right and their left forks to eat, one in each hand.
• When a philosopher has finished eating, they put their forks back on the table and start sleeping. Once awake, they start thinking again. The simulation stops when a philosopher dies of starvation.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• GCC compiler
• GNU Make

Compilation

To compile the project, run:

cd philo
make

Usage

Run the executable with the following arguments:

./philo number_of_philosophers time_to_die time_to_eat time_to_sleep [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]

• number_of_philosophers: The number of philosophers and also the number of forks.
• time_to_die (in milliseconds): If a philosopher didn’t start eating time_to_die milliseconds since the beginning of their last meal or the beginning of the simulation, they die.
• time_to_eat (in milliseconds): The time it takes for a philosopher to eat. During that time, they will need to hold two forks.
• time_to_sleep (in milliseconds): The time a philosopher will spend sleeping.
• number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat (optional argument): If all philosophers have eaten at least number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat times, the simulation stops. If not specified, the simulation stops when a philosopher dies.

Examples

A philosopher should not die:

./philo 5 800 200 200

A philosopher should die:

./philo 4 310 200 100

Simulation should stop after each philosopher has eaten 7 times:

./philo 5 800 200 200 7

Authors

• JNTHNN