2 Lines of Code Saved 6.4x Memory on My Snake AI

Greetings all! In my previous post I covered Binary Plane Encoding, a 3-channel grid representation for Snake that doubled the best published score. Three binary channels: head, body, apple. For details check my previous post. But there was a fourth channel I left out. Direction. The snake's current heading, encoded as a uint8 (0 = up, 1 = right, 2 = down, 3 = left), is painted uniformly across a 20×20 plane due to matrix shape requirements. That's 400 elements carrying exactly 2 bits of informa