I think it would be fun to explore the 10 bit idea a bit more. Yes, you would have to have more code to work with it; but that is exactly what would be fun to

I think it would be fun to explore the 10 bit idea a bit more. Yes, you would have to have more code to work with it; but that is exactly what would be fun to explore. That is, I'd love to see an exploration of how big both the encoding and the executing program are and how they play against each other. As others have already noted, you could skip the encoding of the board as a "first class" piece of data and instead have a large program where the state of the board is implied by where in the code you are. In a sense, this is a complete minimization of the board's encoding and should result in a maximal sized code. It would be fun to plot how these two values interact with each other.