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].
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:
For an even shorter, and lighter, read on checkers engine, I recommend Blondie24[0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838
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.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838/