What projects have been undertaken to solve chess completely? Chess is not completely solved yet but what efforts have been undertaken to solve it? Has there been a large project like the HGP or is something like that even worth pursuing? What failed efforts have been there if any? I am speculating that the the Alpha Zero project must have taken some steps towards that end.
EDIT:-Answers ponder on the point that is extremely difficult to solve chess which i have clearly indicated in the first line in the question. What I would like to know that are there or have there been any projects that try to solve chess. Like that Moscow university 7-piece tablebases and any efforts like that. It is clearly an expensive problem to solve but who is doing it and what approaches are being taken? It is often said that there are more chess combinations than atoms in the universe (probably because of that ad) but so are the real numbers but we have a rich theory about that. We also know a great deal about the universe as well but we had to try hard to get to that point. Is chess being treated the same is my question.
Endgame tablebases can be seen as such an effort, in that we started at few pieces and have increased the number. In 2012, 7 piece tablebases -from Moscow state university were generated, so chess is solved for positions of 7 or fewer pieces (including the kings).
The problem is, the 7 piece tablebases take about 140 TB in storage. 8 piece tablebases would take about 10 petabyte of storage, and a computer with 50 TB of ram (source) to keep hashes in memory to generate them in reasonable time (a few years?). I guess it would be doable these days if someone makes the millions of dollars available. 9 seems way out of reach.
So it will take a while before we get to 32.