UPDATE: I’ve written a new post with a new technique which is about 2.5x more efficient than this approach Chess notation has come a long way since descriptive notation, now we have nice and decipherable Standard Algebraic Notation, like Qxf7 (queen takes on f7) or Nf3 (knight takes on f3). This is a great text format, but a massive waste of space if you’re trying to store a lot of these. Qxf7 takes 4 bytes, or 32 bits. Let’s do some rough back-of-the-envelope math of how much informati...
