Can you explain what the problem of competitive conditions means in multithreaded programming?

The race condition problem occurs when multiple threads or processes simultaneously access and modify shared data without proper synchronization. As a result, the final state of data can be unpredictable and depend on the order of operations.

For example, if two threads increment a counter at the same time, without locks, the final value may be less than expected because read and write operations overlap.

To prevent race conditions, synchronization mechanisms such as locks, semaphores, mutexes, and other primitives are used to ensure that only one thread modifies data at a critical moment.