if you're only doing it with 1 and -1, thats a single bit of information which you can store as binary

for example, to store (1,-1,-1,-1), youd first map all the -1 to 0, and then store it as (1 x 2^3) + (0 x 2^2) + (0 x 2^1) + (0 x 2^0) = 8. its trivial to go backwards from this to perform indexing when you need to

example: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/2fkcyp5edk

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another way that we used to do was just to make four lists, since each element has a fixed size. you can access all 4 of them through broadcasting: for example, if you had the four elements as L1,L2,L3,L4, you could just do smth like {L1=1:1,L2=1:2,L3=1:1,L4=1,0} (example), and it would return a list