What do you think of this fact?
Every time you scan a menu or a concert ticket, you’re using an idea that started at a Go board during a lunch break.
A barcode problem in car factories
In the early 1990s, Japanese car makers tracked components with linear barcodes. According to ANZ, those held only about 20 alphanumeric characters, so a single component could need up to 10 of them. In 1992, Masahiro Hara, an engineer at Denso, a company in the Toyota group, set out to find something better.
Black and white stones
His inspiration was sitting on the lunch table. “I used to play GO on my lunch break,” Hara told ANZ. Go is played with black and white stones on a grid of 19 by 19 lines, and Hara realized that a pattern like that could carry information.
IEEE Spectrum describes a second lesson from the game: you can still tell where a piece is, even when it sits slightly off an intersection. Hara built that kind of tolerance into the code with redundant data. That’s why a QR code can still be read when 30 percent of it is dirty or damaged.
A skyscraper in every corner
The code also had to stand out from the text printed around it. While riding a train, Hara noticed a tall building that stood out from everything nearby. That gave him the idea for the square boxes in the corners of the code. Finding the right mix of black and white for them took three months of testing. The winner was a ratio of 1:1:3:1:1.
Denso introduced the QR code in 1994. According to Hara, it can handle up to 7,087 digits. Denso kept its patents but chose not to enforce them, ANZ reports, so other companies could use the code freely, and it spread far beyond the factory floor.
Bonus fact: QR stands for Quick Response, a name chosen because the code was built to be read fast.
So the squares on your train ticket owe a lot to a board game that is thousands of years old and a lunch break well spent.