my condolences to his family and best friends.
don, we will miss you. i will miss you.
i first heard about don dailey in the early days of my computerchess life.
we all remember rexchess pc dos program.
http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/RexChess
it was in black and white and ran on hercules graphic cards. this was BEFORE VGA graphic cards were invented.
even at this early time, don and larry wrote a cool chess program, that had hash tables and was very nice.
later came socrates with julio kaplan.
we met at the aegon tournament.
http://www.thorstenczub.de/aegon.html
in this year chris whittington and me participated with chess system tal.
Don had a little laptop with him and had big fun letting his engine play against chess system tal and watch the different evaluations and when CSTAL sacced a piece against it. he was sitting there with this tiny laptop and hacking the keyboard like hell and saying: ough - thats interesting. it cannot work, or ?
yes. don was always open for new and exiting things. he had so much fun
doing computerchess.
i remember testing dons chess program DOCH. he rewrote it completely new from the scratch and it took very long for the engine to climb up into my testings. but in the end it was the leader of the tournament.
he then rewrote it again and renamed it komodo.
and lots of versions and versions came. he wanted to reach the top of all lists with komodo. but it was a race with his desease too. knowing about his desease and seeing how the engine developed was not easy. but don
was always in good mood. or helped not to fall down emotionally.
his enthusiasm. his energy. his friendship.
how can we forget it. there is now a gap. he is missing.
computerchess lost an important person.
i am sure don will not stop to exist somewhere.
i am sure somewhere he is still developing and rewriting algorithms and
his enthusiasm will light up the sky. always hoping.
always programming. even in the face of a severe desease.
never giving up. with a smile on his face. the smile he made
us all happy to be here on earth. he will send this energy into the universe.
thanks don for all you gave to us.
we will not forget those moments.
not forget you.
What seems like a fairy tale today may be reality tomorrow.
Here we have a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow....