I would say there are 10 states. Any square can be empty or have an ant, and if the ant is there its direction is known. That gives 5 states of ant presence and direction, and since a square has 2 color states, that's 10 total states.
>English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.
I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.