Go: With the Flow
January 2002
Go: With the Flow
Meyer and Silla
Northeastern Remembers
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Alumni Passages Classes
From the Field First-Person
Huskiana
GO: WITH THE FLOW
Ancient Buddhist monks and samurai warriors played it.
Einstein was a devotee. In Asian business circles, it cements
relationships, much the way golf does in America.
But could this deceptively simple, endlessly fascinating 4,000year-old game really improve your management choices? And
your life?
Think Monopoly, with manners. It’s a territorial game that
Einstein enjoyed and the Internet embraces, where an Attila
the Hun approach won’t get you to Marvin Gardens, and
closing the deal requires more than plundering and pillaging.
To win at Go—also known as igo, wei ch’i, or baduk, depending
on whether you’re playing in Japan, China, or Korea—you need
patience, shrewdness, big-picture thinking, and, yes, even the
capacity for sacrifice. Those who keep their power mongering
in check earn large chunks of a gridded board—not to mention
a new view of the world.
Used to teach business strategy in both Asia and America, Go
looks like a cinch at first. But be forewarned: There’s no $200
waiting for you as you sneak past jail. Go players have to earn
their keep.
In his living room, Sangit Chatterjee sits on his heels like
a predator, muscles exuding energy. His hands rest on
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Go: With the Flow
the patterned throw rug beneath him as he stares at the
game board. Only the ceiling fan moves. He could be a
general in a war room, or Churchill, perhaps, following
the progress of the Dunkirk flotilla, lives hanging in the
balance.
Across from Chatterjee, Yang Huiren sits cross-legged on
the floor, a slightly raised knee the lone interruption of
symmetry. Through a window open onto Beacon Street
drifts an air conditioner’s distant moan. No birdsongs, no
snippets of conversation, no car engines coming to life.
Even the fan pays homage to the play as it rotates
noiselessly overhead.
The men move their eyes over the board.
As games go, this one seems relatively unencumbering. There
isn’t a great deal of equipment to haul around—no skates, no
balls, no sticks. There’s no trump, no “shooting the moon.” No
dice, no Community Chest cards. No possibility of winning by
chance. All the pieces look the same, except for their color,
like checkers. And beginners have to remember only four basic
rules.
What’s kept the game popular for roughly 4,000 years?
Proficiency takes practice. A lot of practice. And getting good is
synonymous with getting hooked. In this sense, Go is like
Monopoly. Once you’ve acquired Boardwalk and Park Place,
buying some hotels for your property becomes an obsession.
Dinner can wait.
This afternoon, Chatterjee is a sparring partner and a
rapt pupil. Other times, he’s a semiprofessional tabletennis player. And in his professional capacity, he’s a
management science professor at Northeastern’s College
of Business Administration, where he’s worked since
1979, teaching classes in statistics, writing articles with
titles like “The Evolution of Dominant Market Shares” or
“A Pareto-Like Conjecture in Multiple Regression,”
consulting for prominent businesses.
The professor’s interest in Go goes far beyond the casual.
In 1974, between jobs, Chatterjee—already ranked as a
fairly strong beginner—went to Tokyo, drawn by a
fascination with Japanese culture and with Go’s
mathematical and experimental attributes, eager to
strengthen his game. “For six months, I played all day
and all night. I studied Japanese, made contact with
professional players. Progress was slow—learning Go
takes constant repetition,” Chatterjee says.
After months of study at the Japanese government–
funded Go Institute, Chatterjee was a 1-dan player, a
rank that ordinarily takes three to four years of regular
study and play to achieve. He is now a 5-dan player.
Yang, Chatterjee’s opponent and teacher today, is more
highly skilled, a professional.
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Go: With the Flow
Go boards look like a cross
between graph paper and a
checkerboard. Traditional
Japanese boards, which can
weigh 80 pounds or more,
are placed on the floor
between two players.
(According to legend,
samurai warriors used their
swords to carve the straight
lines on their boards.)
Standard wooden tabletop
versions measure 16 by 18
inches and weigh about 4 to
6 pounds. For computer geeks, a variety of websites offer
virtual boards.
Unlike checkers and chess, which are played within the spaces
of their grids, Go is played on the lines, at the intersections.
Official boards have a 19 by 19 grid, with 361 intersections.
OMNI magazine once calculated that this allows for 10761
possible moves, compared with chess, with 64 squares and
10120 moves.
Beginners usually start small, with a 9 by 9 grid, like an
expanded tic-tac-toe. Once their territorial instincts are
sufficiently whetted, though, new players advance on to larger
boards.
Chatterjee examines the thick wooden board as if he
were following the path of an insect or the ebb and flow
of a skirmish: Eyes stopping, backing up, then returning
to a group of black and white stones on the lower righthand corner. Six black stones nestle within five white
ones in a V formation. Chatterjee eyes the group at
length, as if it were contemplating treason.
Other white and black groups dot the board, like an
imperfect mosaic. Yang stares fixedly from his side,
neither his body nor his eyes conveying any information
to his pupil. Outside, a distant siren wails. No one moves.
To start a game, a player puts a game piece, called a stone,
on any intersection on the board. The player with the black
stones always plays first, followed by the player with the white
stones, each in turn placing one stone on one intersection. To
match a standard board’s 361 intersections, games generally
come with 361 stones (181 black, 180 white), though there is
no official limit on the number of stones that may be played.
Once placed, stones don’t move unless they’re captured,
allowing players to study every play leading up to the one at
hand. In Monopoly, no one remembers how bombastic Uncle
Harry, the self-appointed banker who sells his Get Out of Jail
Free cards at extortionist prices, ended up with all the utilities.
In Go, players can see exactly how territory got captured,
because stones played earlier remain on the board as new
ones are added.
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Go: With the Flow
Two minutes pass. Finally, Chatterjee picks up a stone,
hesitates for a fraction of a second, then places it on the
board with a soft click and a groan. Yang bolts upright,
thrusting his upper body over the board toward
Chatterjee. “Yes! That’s the only move!” he shouts, arms
outstretched as if he could pick up the board and clasp it
to his chest in appreciation.
Go players are ranked
according to their skill.
Beginners hold the rank kyu.
Someone just starting to
play is usually ranked 40
kyu; someone who has
played a few years may be
ranked 1 kyu. The lower the
kyu, the stronger the player.
Dan is the rank given to
advanced amateurs, who
range from 1 to 7 dan—the
higher the dan, the stronger
the player. (A Go aphorism
says, “You must play a thousand games to become 1 dan.”)
And then there are the professionals, also ranked from 1 to 9
dan, though these are different, higher rankings than at the
amateur level.
Professionals and strong amateurs study opening moves, called
fuseki, for years. But for beginners, strategy can be elusive.
After a few games, however, even new players realize that
grouping stones in a corner of the board leads to a frightful
outcome. A more productive strategy is to line stones up some
distance from a corner, providing escape routes, if necessary.
Once a corner is secured, fortification and expansion can
follow.
Yang responds with his own clicking stone, which
Chatterjee quickly answers. They alternate stones with a
feverish precision, as if they’re completing a mosaic
according to some prescribed time and manner. From
above, the board looks like a small city in the midst of a
boom.
The game of Go is all about real estate. One object is to
create territories by surrounding vacant areas of the board
with your stones. The other is to capture your opponent’s
stones by surrounding them on all four sides with your stones.
Throughout play, stones are attacking, defending, escaping,
surrounding. Evasion, deception, and intrigue run rampant.
Strategy is paramount. And a player needs to be greedy: The
one with more territory and more captured stones wins.
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Go: With the Flow
“Go is like six chessboards joined together, with all six
games happening at the same time,” says Chatterjee.
Because of the simultaneous activity on a field of action,
the game has been considered analogous to war. In 1942,
in fact, Life magazine used Go concepts to explain Japan’s
war strategy in the Pacific theater.
But Chatterjee believes the world of global marketing
provides an equally accurate and relevant metaphor. Go
strategy requires making concessions and sacrifices,
forgoing short-term victory for long-term gain, knowing
when to fight and when to avoid fighting. Ultimately, the
winner is the one who makes better decisions—decisions
based on what is happening all around the board, not just
locally.
For business professionals like Chatterjee, who has an
MBA and a PhD in statistics from New York University,
along with a BE from Calcutta University, Go is a powerful
teacher. “It is a laboratory for strategic analysis,”
Chatterjee says. “The Go board is the market, and two
players are trying to occupy it.”
For Northeastern’s high-tech MBA students, Go is part of
the curriculum. Chatterjee teaches Go strategy in an allday weekend elective course. “The primary focus is how
to translate Go into global markets,” says Fred Hoskins,
the College of Business Administration’s executive
director for external relations. “Go encourages a fluid,
flexible way of thinking.”
Go’s handicap system, where the weaker player gets extra
stones to place on the board before play begins, levels the
playing field, reducing the possibility that beginners will be
annihilated the first time they sit across from cutthroat Uncle
Harry.
Eventually (usually in about an hour for beginners, two for
advanced players), all the territory on the board is carved out,
and the game ends—this is the intriguing part—by mutual
agreement. Stones sit side by side, as if by truce, until the
endgame accounting is completed.
“Go is not a winner-take-all game. In a 40–42 game,
even if you lose, you still have won some territory. Just
like in the marketplace, there are multiple winners,
although in absolute terms there is one who has made
more profit,” Chatterjee says.
“Go is more open to the notion that one does not have to
wipe out someone else in order to be successful,” says
Thomas Pucciarello, director of management
development at BAE Systems, a defense contractor in
southern New Hampshire, where Chatterjee is teaching
the company’s managers to play Go. “We can achieve
what we want without devastating someone else. To
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Go: With the Flow
claim the majority of the board doesn’t mean we own the
road.”
In Go—unlike chess, where the only way to win is to kill
the king—aggressive players may not fare well. Balance
is a primary criterion, says Chatterjee: “A move may get
you more than half, but it may be the wrong move.”
Pucciarello agrees. “If we negotiate the best possible
price for an item with a vendor without thinking about
what it will do to that vendor, then we may not have
anyone to buy from in the future. That works with my
customers as well. If I try to get the most out of them, I
may not have a customer base in the future; they will go
elsewhere or go broke,” he says.
Asian executives who play Go frequently—sealing deals over
boards instead of fairways—talk about it as a game of
productivity. Securing corners is analogous to securing a niche
in the domestic market. Fuseki moves are comparable to new
product requirements. The endgame, where prisoners are
exchanged, is like a trade surplus or deficit.
Like diplomatic relations and tennis, Go requires good manners
from its players. The game’s Chinese roots imbue it with
tradition and etiquette (values that could cause hard-boiled
Uncle Harry some trouble).
In 1049, the Chinese writer Chang Ni compared a Go board
with the universe. He believed the 361 intersections
represented the 360 days in the Chinese lunar year, plus one,
which represented the supreme being. The board’s four
quadrants represented the four seasons. And the equal division
of black and white stones paralleled the balance of yin and
yang.
Go players talk about patterns, balance, and symmetry
because, well, the board and the stones have so few
distinguishing features. Stones in familiar formations are your
lifeboats and navigational tools. Similarly, maintaining
symmetry keeps stones connected and impervious to invasion.
If you don’t pay attention to stone formations, shicho (“the
ladder”) will pin you to the edge again.
“A good Go player has physical stamina, long-term
dedication, the ability to learn, and the ability to lose,”
says Chatterjee, who studies how players improve their
games and writes books (Galactic Go, Cosmic Go) and
articles (for American Go Journal and Go Winds) about
his findings.
For Chatterjee, both the study and the game itself are
enticing. “I have always been fascinated with the concept
of the infinite,” he says, describing mathematics
—“number theory, in particular”—as a pursuit close to his
heart. And Go plays to his strengths. “Remembering and
using large chunks of knowledge—josekis, sequences—
lets me plan and design at the macro level. Being able to
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Go: With the Flow
use my memory has always made Go seductive,” he says.
But the game of Go is not his only passion. Chatterjee
also writes about baseball (“Improvement by Spreading
the Wealth—The Case of Home Runs in Major League
Baseball,” in the Journal of Sports Economics), basketball
(“Who Is the Greatest Rebounder of All Time?” in Chance
magazine), and golf (“An Analysis of 1992 Performance
Statistics at the USPGA Senior PGA and LPGA Tours,” in
Science and Golf).
“I study improvement,” says Chatterjee, who considers
the topic his particular niche. “Improvement, progress,
and what it all means.”
For serious Go competitors—those who compete for the
prestigious Samsung Cup, for example—improvement can
mean winning significant prize money, the kind
professional athletes see. Youth is no impediment. “The
world’s best players are getting younger, with twentytwo- and twenty-three-year-olds dominating the
tournaments,” says Chatterjee.
In the world of Go, however, even straightforward
proficiency has its rewards. At last summer’s China
International Go Culture Gala, held in Guiyang, in southcentral China, a week of festivities concluded with the
simultaneous playing of 2,001 Go games in the town
square. Chatterjee was honored as the 2,001st
competitor. “I played with the mayor of Guiyang!”
Katy Kramer, MA’00, a freelance writer living in New
Hampshire, writes this magazine’s “Husky Tracks.”
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