Doesn't this radically change the constraints of the dining philosophers problem?<p>The existence "fork <- revoke" calls mean that you're no longer designing a solution for coordination/resource management (the usual aim of dining philosophers); you're designing a system in which a higher-permissioned administration system manages resources for lower-permissioned users.<p>The untrusted-peer problem is interesting on its own, but my gut says it's different from the usual aim of this puzzle: to figure out the simplest/best strategies, or simplest/best means of central administration, required to manage resources effectively.
The comment on code signing is always a good one to remember: "You could verify that the signature is truly Satan's, but proof that it came from Satan is not proof that it is safe."
What I found really sad to see is the amount of dead links at the end of the document. Of all the links 2 are still in existence.<p>The broken links include links on the same domain.<p>What a sad state of affairs - and I am guilty of it myself, having killed content on the web oftentimes in the past. Not sure what to do about it, though.
Mildly worth noting that the Original-E dialect of this article's code is different from later E. If you don't like the syntax, maybe you'll find it gets better! Also there's Monte which looks rather like Python.
Basically diner problem is simplied version of real world, which this approach is trying to oversimply it by introducing something, information about how to eat shrimp.<p>Normal setup should be more in line with, each have forks, knives and spoons, and there is a new food in table, which can require (x amount of forks, y amount of knives and z amount of spoons) and where you dont have information about this requirement upfront.<p>In here system knows about the requirements to eat shrimp, which is removing the forks from equation (where central system can manage forks, and the only function here is to ‘eat’)
> A philosopher is not necessarily made by a fork dispenser, but it is initialized by a fork dispenser.<p>That made me laugh. When a fork dispenser dispenses philosophers, your data modeling took a wrong turn somewhere.