Don Dailey (March 10, 1956 – November 22, 2013) was an American longtime 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 A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebases for video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface ...

. Along with collaborator

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

, he was the author of the

chess engine In computer chess, a chess engine is a computer program that analyzes chess or chess variant positions, and generates a move or list of moves that it regards as strongest. A chess engine is usually a back end with a command-line interface wit ...

Komodo Komodo may refer to: Computers * Komodo Edit, a free text editor for dynamic programming languages * Komodo IDE an integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic programming languages * Komodo (chess), a chess engine People * 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 secondary education, secondary or tertiary education, tertiary higher education, higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membershi ...

chess programs. He has been an active poster in computer chess forums and

computer Go Computer Go is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to creating a computer program that plays the traditional board game Go. The field is sharply divided into two eras. Before 2015, the programs of the era were weak. The best ...

newsgroups. He was raised as a

Jehovah's Witness Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The group reports a worldwide membership of approximately 8.7 million adherents involved in ev ...

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 and pronounced ) is a group of blood cancers that usually begin in the bone marrow and result in 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 Samuel Howard Sloan (born September 7, 1944) is an American perennial candidate and former broker-dealer. In 1978, he won a case ''pro se'' before the United States Supreme Court, becoming the last non-lawyer to argue a case in front of the cou ...

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 one ...

s and

World Computer Chess Championship World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is an event held periodically since 1974 where computer chess engines compete against each other. The event is organized by the International Computer Games Association. It is often held in conjunction with ...

s. 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 Julio Argentino Kaplan Pera (born 25 July 1950, Argentina) is a Puerto Rican chess player, former world junior chess champion as well as software developer and founder of Heuristic Software. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1964 to Pue ...

within his company ''Heuristic Software''. The program they developed was called ''Heuristic Alpha'', which later evolved into

Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...

Socrates II Socrates II is a chess program that, in 1993, won the 23rd North American Computer Chess Championship. It ran on an IBM PC. This was the first and only time that a stock microcomputer won this event, finishing ahead of past winners Cray Blitz ...

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

on an

IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...

ahead of

Cray Blitz Cray Blitz was a computer chess program written by Robert Hyatt, Harry L. Nelson, and Albert Gower to run on the Cray supercomputer. It was derived from "Blitz" a program that Hyatt started to work on as an undergraduate. "Blitz" played its firs ...

, he met Bradley Kuszmaul and Charles Leiserson from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

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 originated as a German nickname for Friedrich, or Frederick (''Der Alte Fritz'', and ''Stary Fryc'' were common nicknames for King Frederick II of Prussia and Frederick III, German Emperor) as well as for similar names including Fridolin a ...

. 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 t ...

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 loops ...

''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: ''Patterbuorn'', also ''Paterboärn'') is a city in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, capital of the Paderborn district. The name of the city derives from the river Pader and ''Born'', an old German term for t ...

''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

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 Top Chess Engine Championship, formerly known as Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC or nTCEC), is a computer chess tournament that has been run since 2010. It was organized, directed, and hosted by Martin Thoresen until the end of Season 6; f ...

, the latter in a 48-game match versus stage 4 winner Stockfish 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

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 Deaths from cancer in Virginia Computer chess people Deaths from leukemia People from Kalamazoo, Michigan