Re: The boringness of the dual of exponential

[Robert Dawson <rdawson@cs.smu.ca>]

On 16/11/2011 11:47 AM, Jeremy Gibbons wrote:
>
> On 15 Nov 2011, at 13:03, Robert Dawson wrote:
...
>> My recollection was that there were two versions - "dining
>> philosophers" who had shared access to two forks, either one of which
>> sufficed; and "dining Chinese philosophers" who had shared access to two
>> chopsticks of which both were needed.
>
> The dining philosophers need both forks/chopsticks. The point of the
> problem is the competing access to shared resources: how to manage the
> requests to avoid deadlock (eg by everyone picking up their left fork,
> and then blocking on waiting for the right fork).

       It seems to me there was a single fork version too in which the
(intentionally less difficult) problem occurred when the two  neighbours
of one philosopher picked up both the forks to which he had access; and
that the point of the chopsticks was to make one implement  useless.

 	Robert


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