The thing is that when you create a dense ASCII representation, any gain you might make from the spatial relationships is lost by: a) the tokeniser not working

The thing is that when you create a dense ASCII representation, any gain you might make from the spatial relationships is lost by: a) the tokeniser not working on characters alone (remember strawberrry), and b) the increased number of 'dead' tokens encoding not very much. Our sparse encoding seems to confuse the models less - even though it certainly isn't perfect.