Snake in Optimal Space and Time.

We revisit the classic game of Snake and ask the basic data structural question: how many bits does it take to represent the state of a snake game so that it can be updated in constant time? Our main result is a data structure that uses optimal space (within constant factors). To achieve our results, we introduce several interesting data structural techniques, including a decomposition technique for the problem, a tabulation scheme for encoding small subproblems, and a dynamic memory allocation scheme.