Its interesting to see people get stuck on the "Firing Squad" aspect of it. There is an insight there about communicating through metaphor effectively.
As a synchronization problem this one was a lot of fun, I too encountered it in the Feynman book and later used variants of it in interviewing folks for Google. Basically once you get into the realm of distribution the ability to get large groups of programs working together introduces a lot of complexity into an otherwise straightforward problem space.
An interesting variant is that you create a line of students. The teacher asks them to form a line at the door with the tallest student in front and the shortest in the back. How can any given student know its there turn to join the line at the door?
As a synchronization problem this one was a lot of fun, I too encountered it in the Feynman book and later used variants of it in interviewing folks for Google. Basically once you get into the realm of distribution the ability to get large groups of programs working together introduces a lot of complexity into an otherwise straightforward problem space.
An interesting variant is that you create a line of students. The teacher asks them to form a line at the door with the tallest student in front and the shortest in the back. How can any given student know its there turn to join the line at the door?