Lamport's bakery algorithm

Lamport's bakery algorithm is a computer algorithm devised by computer scientist Leslie Lamport, as part of his long study of the formal correctness of concurrent systems, which is intended to improve the safety in the usage of shared resources among multiple threads by means of mutual exclusion.

In computer science, it is common for multiple threads to simultaneously access the same resources. Data corruption can occur if two or more threads try to write into the same memory location, or if one thread reads a memory location before another has finished writing into it. Lamport's bakery algorithm is one of many mutual exclusion algorithms designed to prevent concurrent threads entering critical sections of code concurrently to eliminate the risk of data corruption.