Chess move compression was an interesting topic back when the games were stored on 360k floppy disks. Nowadays every master chess game ever played in the history of chess fits easily on one DVD, uncompressed.<p>So it&#x27;s not clear what the point of compressing the moves, especially since at some points the article is concerned about size and sometimes about speed. If it&#x27;s just an intellectual exercise then consider the following scheme:<p>Generate the legal moves for a position, then sort them. However don&#x27;t sort them using a naive method like alphabetical order. Instead sort them in order of likeliness of being played. For example moves that capture the last moved piece are at the top of the list. So for example 1.e4 d5, now the first move in the list would be exd5, capturing the last moved piece. So the move exd5 can be encoded in 1 bit. Now imagine a 40 move game where every move played was the first one on the sorted list. This takes 80 bits to store the entire game. Of course moves farther down the list take more bits to encode.<p>This is similar to one of the schemes in the article, but the article gets hung up with fixing bit sizes rather than just using the exact number of bits required for each move which results in variable bit lengths for each move.<p>This is, more or less, the scheme Chessbase first used for their data files almost 30 years ago.