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...

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...

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., ...

This paper deals with the 2-Peripatetic Salesman Problem for the case where costs respect the triangle inequality. The aim is to determine 2 edge disjoint Hamiltonian cycles of minimum total cost on a graph. We first present a straightforward 9/4 approximation algorithm based on the well known Christofides algorithm for the travelling salesman problem. Then we propose a 2(n−1)/n-approximation p...