> We could simply assign a number to all of the s[t]ates, which would take up 10 bits. [But] in practice we’re going to need a lookup table to map each number t

> We could simply assign a number to all of the s[t]ates, which would take up 10 bits. [But] in practice we’re going to need a lookup table to map each number to a larger, more structured representation, which defeats the whole idea behind a [10 bit] compressed representation Maybe? What if you brute forced a block cipher to encode/decode each 10-bit mapping into the raw 15-bit mapping (i.e., a 9-digit base-3 number). It may take some crunching to find it, but only once. Maybe someone else can tell me how feasible this is.