The dining-philosophers problem is considered a classic synchronization problem neither because of its practical importance nor because computer scientists dislike philosophers but because it is an example of a large class of concurrency-control problems. It is a simple representation of the need to allocate several resources among several processes in a deadlock-free and starvation-free manner.
One simple solution is to represent each chopstick with a semaphore. A
philosopher tries to grab a chopstick by executing a wait() operation on that
semaphore. She releases her chopsticks by executing the signal() operation
on the appropriate semaphores. Thus, the shared data are
do {
wait(chopstick[i]);
wait(chopstick[(i+1) % 5]);
...
/* eat for awhile */
...
signal(chopstick[i]);
signal(chopstick[(i+1) % 5]);
...
/* think for awhile */
...
} while (true);
where all the elements of chopstick are initialized to 1