There are already many solutions to the “Santa Claus Problem” by John Trono1. It’s a “problem simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve”; the author’s original solution (based on semaphores) was only partly correct. The probably most known analysis of the problem was written by Mordechai Ben-Ari2, who also provided solutions in Ada95 and Java. This is the original problem description: Santa Claus sleeps in his shop up at the North Pole, and can only be wakened by either all nine reindeer being back from their year long vacation on the beaches of some tropical island in the South Pacific, or by some elves who are having some difficulties making the toys. Read More ...

The four days at the ACCU Conference in Oxford are over. Except Günter nobody seems to have blogged the C++ track. Apart from the discussions and presentations what should go into the next C++ standard (called C++0x and scheduled for 2009), one of the big topics was concurrency and a new awareness that some new ideas are needed. Herb Sutter presented the points of his recent DDJ article. As an example for an exercise simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve he mentioned the Santa Claus Problem: Read More ...