Check if a number is divisible by 3

Question

Write code to determine if a number is divisible by 3. The input to the function is a single bit, 0 or 1, and the output should be 1 if the number received so far is the binary representation of a number divisible by 3, otherwise zero.

Examples:

input  "0":       (0)  output 1
inputs "1,0,0":   (4)  output 0
inputs "1,1,0,0": (6)  output 1

This is based on an interview question. I ask for a drawing of logic gates but since this is stackoverflow I'll accept any coding language. Bonus points for a hardware implementation (verilog etc).

Part a (easy): First input is the MSB.

Part b (a little harder): First input is the LSB.

Part c (difficult): Which one is faster and smaller, (a) or (b)? (Not theoretically in the Big-O sense, but practically faster/smaller.) Now take the slower/bigger one and make it as fast/small as the faster/smaller one.

Answer 1

There's a fairly well-known trick for determining whether a number is a multiple of 11, by alternately adding and subtracting its decimal digits. If the number you get at the end is a multiple of 11, then the number you started out with is also a multiple of 11:

47278    4 - 7 + 2 - 7 + 8 = 0, multiple of 11     (47278 = 11 * 4298)
52214    5 - 2 + 2 - 1 + 4 = 8, not multiple of 11 (52214 = 11 * 4746 + 8)

We can apply the same trick to binary numbers. A binary number is a multiple of 3 if and only if the alternating sum of its bits is also a multiple of 3:

4   = 100       1 - 0 + 0 = 1, not multiple of 3
6   = 110       1 - 1 + 0 = 0, multiple of 3
78  = 1001110   1 - 0 + 0 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 0 = 0, multiple of 3
109 = 1101101   1 - 1 + 0 - 1 + 1 - 0 + 1 = 1, not multiple of 3

It makes no difference whether you start with the MSB or the LSB, so the following Python function works equally well in both cases. It takes an iterator that returns the bits one at a time. multiplier alternates between 1 and 2 instead of 1 and -1 to avoid taking the modulo of a negative number.

def divisibleBy3(iterator):

    multiplier = 1
    accumulator = 0

    for bit in iterator:
        accumulator = (accumulator + bit * multiplier) % 3
        multiplier = 3 - multiplier

    return accumulator == 0