The concept of livelocks

The concept of a livelock is connected to a deadlock; some even consider it an alternate version of a deadlock. In a livelock situation, the processes (or threads) in the concurrent program can switch their states; in fact, they switch states constantly. Yet, they simply switch back and forth infinitely, and no progress is made. We will now consider an actual scenario of a livelock.

Suppose that a pair of spouses are eating dinner together at a table. They only have one fork to share, so only one of them can eat at any given point. Additionally, the spouses are polite to each other, so even if one spouse is hungry and wants to eat their food, they will leave the fork on the table if their partner is also hungry. This specification is at the heart of creating a livelock for this problem: when both spouses are hungry, each will wait for the other to eat first, creating an infinite loop in which each spouse switches between wanting to eat and waiting for the...