[quicktwo]

Not sure what technique you're using for the answers list, but the compress5.py suggests it's doing a basic bitmap.

Base bitmap is 12972 bits, or 1622 bytes (your file lists 1619, not sure why it's 3 bytes smaller, but all the same). You can "skip encode" (I don't know the formal name for this technique) into 1232 bytes by encoding runs of three [0, 0, 0] as [0], and anything else as [1, X, X, X], saving another 390 bytes.

I tried all combinations of runs between 1 and 7, and 3 is optimal.