Yes I read the book decades ago and it was indeed excellent. IIRC, the technical details are probably too light for the HN crowd, but it was the biographical stories that had interested me.

For an even shorter, and lighter, read on checkers engine, I recommend Blondie24[0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838

This is a fun book (published in 2001) about how a professor and his graduate assistant developed a world-class checkers-playing algorithm using neuroevolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie24

https://www.amazon.com/Blondie24-Playing-Kaufmann-Artificial...

(Edit) One of the funniest parts I remember is that they had to leave it running on a Pentium III for like a month or something.

This has been the norm since computers could play board games. I read Blondie24[0] about a year back about 2 guys who build a complicated neural network for a checkers program which teaches itself to play by playing against itself and is eventually entered into 'Human' tournaments. It's a really fast read even if you have no experience in AI.

There is also Deep Blue[1], which is famous for once defeating Garry Kasparov in a high profile match.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Blondie24-Playing-Kaufmann-Artificial-... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_%28chess_computer%29

The book Blondie24 is an interesting popular science style account of this type of AI.

http://www.amazon.com/Blondie24-Playing-Kaufmann-Artificial-...

They partially trained their checkers algorithm by playing it online against humans. The funny part was that they couldn't get many opponents until they changed their handle to Blondie24, then game requests came flooding in...