"""biology uses a more straightforward encoding, where some of the 64 possible triples just don’t represent anything""" I don't think this is strictly true, 61

"""biology uses a more straightforward encoding, where some of the 64 possible triples just don’t represent anything""" I don't think this is strictly true, 61 of the 64 codons translate into 1 of 20 amino acids, and the other 3 are "stop" codons, which I'd argue do represent something. (and at least one of those is sometimes translated as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine)