What is another way to do division?

Answer 1

There are many different algorithms for division.

On binary computers one of the fastest is called Booth's nonrestoring division algorithm, it takes the same number of cycles as there are bits in the word being divided plus one or two cycles for final sign correction.

Seymour Cray removed the division instruction entirely from his supercomputers and replaced it with a reciprocal approximation instruction, division was then performed by multiplication by the reciprocal. In highspeed pipelined floating point hardware this algorithm is significantly faster than an ordinary division instruction.

Just like multiplication can be done by repeated additions of the same number, division can also be done by repeated subtraction. For example 23/3 can be done by subtracting 3 from 23 repeatedly giving values 23, 20, 17, 14, 11, 8, 5 ,2 until the resulting value is less than the 3. The result would be the number of times the subtraction was done (which is 7) and a remainder of 2 (or 7 2/3).

You can use counters (e.g. bottle caps, Poker chips) and lay out rows of them containing the number of tokens corresponding to the divisor. After laying out a total number of tokens corresponding to the dividend, count how many complete rows there are giving the quotient. If an incomplete row remains the number of tokens in it is the remainder.

Answer 2

Another way to do division is by using long division. This involves dividing the dividend (the number being divided) by the divisor (the number dividing the dividend) and finding the quotient (the result) and remainder (if any).