alt Hacker NewsIf you are writing a chess engine you'll want to store hundreds of millions of positions while you search for the best move and at that scale a byte is important because it gets multiplied by an enormous factor.
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not_the_fda • last Friday at 8:11 PM
If they cared about that, then it wouldn't have been written in python. This is an exercise of the author showing how clever they are.
But that is a totally different problem which requires far fewer bytes to represent. For that problem you are just considering of the valid pieces which made a move and what board that came from. Storing a single move is far cheaper than an entire board state.