A CNN Grid Encoding for Snake AI That DOUBLES! the Best Published Score

A traditional Snake game grid has only 4 states each grid point can be in: empty, head, body, or apple. And for some reason every published Snake AI paper either throws away spatial information by condensing the game state into a handful of hand-picked numbers, or buries entity identity under layers of raw pixel data that the network has to untangle. Incredibly wasteful. The solution? Binary Plane Encoding. Using it, a CNN-based model reached a record score of 125 on a 20×20 grid in 2.5 hours on