[8] 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,[9] 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.

[10] Dailey continued his cooperation with Charles Leiserson on the massively parallel chess program Cilkchess, written in Cilk.

[17] Finalist Stockfish DD, dedicated to Don Dailey, was officially released during the final,[18] the commercial Komodo-TCEC a few days later.