Accepting the Romantics as Philosophers

Progress with Java threads as dining philosophers

The classical problem of the dining philosphers is solved and implemented with Java threads, without central coordination. Apart from the initialization the program is symmetric. The philosophers are the synchronized objects whereas the forks between the philosophers are unsynchronized. It is proved that every hungry philosopher eats within bounded delay, in a certain formalized sense.

Honors Students as Philosophers and Detectives

The Philosophers ' Process

The Philosophers' Process is a Markovian version of the famous Dining Philosophers Problem introduced by Dijkstra as a model for resource sharing. It can be viewed as a reversible interacting particle system. This paper deals with the problem of computing its reversible measure in the case of a large but nite number of sites. This equilibrium measure is a Markov eld on the underlying graph of i...

Augustine and the Philosophers

Because of the immensity of Augustine’s corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine’s engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical poin...

The Driving Philosophers

We introduce a new synchronization problem in mobile ad-hoc systems: the Driving Philosophers. In this problem, an unbounded number of driving philosophers (processes) access a round-about (set of shared resources organized along a logical ring). The crux of the problem is to ensure, beside traditional mutual exclusion and starvation freedom at each particular resource, gridlock freedom (i.e., ...