Don Dailey (March 10, 1956 – November 22, 2013) was an American researcher in

computer chess Computer chess includes both hardware (dedicated computers) and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysi ...

and a game programmer. Along with collaborator

Larry Kaufman Lawrence Charles Kaufman (born November 15, 1947) is an American chess player. He was awarded the title Grandmaster by FIDE for winning the 2008 World Seniors Championship (which he later retroactively shared with Mihai Suba). Kaufman had been ...

, he was the author of the

chess engine In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or List of chess variants, chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess software engine, engine is usually a Front ...

Komodo. Dailey started chess programming in the 1980s, and was the author and co-author of multiple commercial as well as

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...

chess programs. He has been an active poster in computer chess forums and computer Go newsgroups. He was raised as a Jehovah's Witness and served in recent years as an elder in the church of Roanoke. In October 2013, Dailey announced the release of Komodo 6, but also news concerning the future status of Komodo due to his fatal illness of an acute form of

leukemia Leukemia ( also spelled leukaemia; pronounced ) is a group of blood cancers that usually begin in the bone marrow and produce high numbers of abnormal blood cells. These blood cells are not fully developed and are called ''blasts'' or '' ...

, and introduced Mark Lefler as new member of the Komodo team. Dailey died of leukemia at the age of 57 on November 22, 2013.

''Rex''

''Rex'' was Dailey's first chess program in the 1980s, in collaboration with Sam Sloan and Larry Kaufman. It competed at various ACM

North American Computer Chess Championship The North American Computer Chess Championship was a computer chess championship held from 1970 to 1994. It was organised by the Association for Computing Machinery and by Monty Newborn, professor of computer science at McGill University. It was o ...

s and World Computer Chess Championships. Rex was improved further and marketed as ''RexChess''.

Heuristic software

In the early 1990s, Dailey started to work with chess master and computer chess programmer Julio Kaplan within his company ''Heuristic Software''. The program they developed was called ''Heuristic Alpha'', which later evolved into

Socrates Socrates (; ; – 399 BC) was a Ancient Greek philosophy, Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and as among the first moral philosophers of the Ethics, ethical tradition ...

, Socrates II and the

mass market The term "mass market" refers to a market for goods produced on a large scale for a significant number of end consumers. The mass market differs from the niche market in that the former focuses on consumers with a wide variety of backgrounds with ...

entry Kasparov's Gambit.

MIT connection

At the ACM 1993 computer chess tournament, which was won by Dailey's program Socrates II on an

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...

ahead of Cray Blitz, he met Bradley Kuszmaul and Charles Leiserson from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

competing with ''StarTech'', and they asked him to help develop a new parallel chess program. Some time later when Heuristic went out of business, he began working part-time for Leiserson at the lab at MIT on the new parallel program ''Star Socrates'', beside his duty as official systems administrator. Star Socrates played a strong World Computer Chess Championship 1995 in Shatin, Hong Kong, finally losing the playoff versus

Fritz Fritz is a common German language, German male name. The name originated as a German diminutive of Friedrich (given name), Friedrich or Frederick (given name), Frederick (''Der Alte Fritz'', and ''Stary Fryc'' were common nicknames for King Fred ...

. Dailey continued his cooperation with Charles Leiserson on the

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

chess program ''Cilkchess'', written in

Cilk Cilk, Cilk++, Cilk Plus and OpenCilk are general-purpose programming languages designed for multithreaded parallel computing. They are based on the C and C++ programming languages, which they extend with constructs to express parallel loop ...

''Corel'' and ''Mini''

Additionally, in the 1990s, Dailey further worked with

on the commercial mass market entry ''Corel Chess''. Beside competing with Cilkchess, their serial chess program ''Mini'' played the World Computer Chess Championship 1999 in

Paderborn Paderborn (; Westphalian language, Westphalian: ''Patterbuorn'', also ''Paterboärn'') is a city in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, capital of the Paderborn (district), Paderborn district. The name of the city derives from the river Pade ...

''Doch'' and Komodo

After a break from computer chess and a few years focusing on other domains, Dailey's 2009/2010 chess program ''Doch'' as well as its successor Komodo are again a joint effort in collaboration with

. In Fall 2013, the developmental version of Komodo won stage 3, and already after Don's death, the final of the Thoresen Chess Engines Competition, the latter in a 48-game match versus stage 4 winner

Stockfish Stockfish is unsalted fish, especially cod, dried by cold air and wind on wooden racks (which are called "hjell" in Norway) on the foreshore. The drying of food is the world's oldest known preservation method, and dried fish has a storage li ...

by a margin of 25–23. Finalist ''Stockfish DD'', dedicated to Don Dailey, was officially released during the final, the commercial Komodo-TCEC a few days later.Komodo TCEC released
by

, Talkchess.com; December 4, 2013

Notes

References

External links

Don Dailey's ICGA Tournaments

Don Dailey: Chessprogramming wiki

Computerschach, Interview with Don Dailey
by Frank Quisinsky
Schachwelt
December 18–20, 2009
Interview with Don Dailey (Komodo programmer)
, nTCEC interview by Martin Thoresen, April 7, 2013 {{DEFAULTSORT:Dailey, Don 1956 births 2013 deaths Deaths from myelodysplastic syndrome American computer programmers Computer chess people Deaths from leukemia in Virginia People from Kalamazoo, Michigan