Sleeping barbers problem

Imagine a fun game where you are the boss of a barber shop. You have many chairs for customers to sit and get a haircut, and you hired a couple of barbers to work for you. But there's a twist! The barbers can only cut hair if they are not sleeping, and the chairs can only be filled if they are empty. So, you have to keep an eye on the chairs and the barbers to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Let's pretend that you have two barbers, and four chairs for customers to sit in while they wait for their turn. If there are no customers, both barbers become very sleepy and fall asleep. And when a customer comes in and all chairs are full, they leave without getting a haircut, which is bad for business.

So, you have to come up with a solution to keep the barbers awake and the chairs filled. One way to do it is to assign a "wake-up" call to one of the barbers whenever a customer comes in. That means the barber has to start cutting the customer's hair while the other barber takes a nap. Once the first barber finishes with the customer, they also take a nap, and the other barber wakes up to serve the next customer, and so on.

That's the sleeping barber problem - a popular computer science problem that explores how to manage shared resources (barber chairs/ barbers) in a multi-threaded environment(e.g., a busy barber shop) without causing deadlocks or resource exhaustion. The problem can be solved using synchronisation methods like semaphore, mutex, and conditional variables to ensure that shared resources are used efficiently while fulfilling the requirements of all stakeholders involved.