in C/C++ code you dont really need to do mental gymnastics either. I can imagine writing a struct with some clever unions to decode this all in one shot. the ma

in C/C++ code you dont really need to do mental gymnastics either. I can imagine writing a struct with some clever unions to decode this all in one shot. the main benefit as others have point out is 1) to store large number (think billions) of such game positions & searching through them. Also if you are developing for cloud deployment you probably want to use minimal storage needed for space & egress b/w reasons. last reason is something that may not be obvious but if you have some algos that can run efficiently on gpus then you probably want to lay the data out such that its easy(ier) to load in SIMD engines. overall not a bad idea.