Yet another solution. This should handle all ints (including negative ints) except the min value of an int, which would need to be handled as a hard coded exception. This basically does division by subtraction but only using bit operators (shifts, xor, & and complement). For faster speed, it subtracts 3 * (decreasing powers of 2). In c#, it executes around 444 of these DivideBy3 calls per millisecond (2.2 seconds for 1,000,000 divides), so not horrendously slow, but no where near as fast as a simple x/3. By comparison, Coodey's nice solution is about 5 times faster than this one.

public static int DivideBy3(int a) {
    bool negative = a < 0;
    if (negative) a = Negate(a);
    int result;
    int sub = 3 << 29;
    int threes = 1 << 29;
    result = 0;
    while (threes > 0) {
        if (a >= sub) {
            a = Add(a, Negate(sub));
            result = Add(result, threes);
        }
        sub >>= 1;
        threes >>= 1;
    }
    if (negative) result = Negate(result);
    return result;
}
public static int Negate(int a) {
    return Add(~a, 1);
}
public static int Add(int a, int b) {
    int x = 0;
    x = a ^ b;
    while ((a & b) != 0) {
        b = (a & b) << 1;
        a = x;
        x = a ^ b;
    }
    return x;
}

这是c#，因为这是我手边的东西，但与c的区别应该很小。

使用Linux shell脚本:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
    int number = 30;
    char command[25];
    snprintf(command, 25, "echo $((%d %c 3)) ", number, 47);
    system( command );
    return 0;
}

请看我的另一个答案。

并不是所有的答案都是面试官想听到的:

我的回答:

“我绝不会那样做，谁会为这种愚蠢的事情付出代价呢?”没有人 会有一个优势，它不是更快，它只是愚蠢。 教授设计师必须知道这一点，但这必须适用于所有数字，而不仅仅是除以3。”

要将一个32位数字除以3，可以将其乘以0x55555556，然后取64位结果的前32位。

现在剩下要做的就是使用位运算和移位来实现乘法…

我认为正确的答案是:

为什么不用基本运算符来做基本运算呢?

#!/bin/ruby

def div_by_3(i)
  i.div 3        # always return int http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Numeric.html#method-i-div
end