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 Championships 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 II and the
mass market 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 ahead of
Cray Blitz, he met Bradley Kuszmaul and
Charles Leiserson from
MIT 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. Dailey continued his cooperation with Charles Leiserson on the
massively parallel chess program
Cilkchess, written in
Cilk.
Corel and Mini Additionally, in the 1990s, Dailey further worked with
Larry Kaufman 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.
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 wew again a joint effort in collaboration with
Larry Kaufman. 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 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. == Personal life ==