[jiggawatts]

That’s a lot of extra wasted bits! There are only 32 pieces in total, and only one of 16 can move each turn. So a mere 4 bits is sufficient to select the moved piece.

The assumption here is that this is an encoding “at rest” and isn’t used directly, except perhaps for equality comparisons. The decoder would have to track the game state and expand this into a much larger format for programmatic manipulation.