[halfcat]

People have done this. They call it tablebases [1]. They’ve computed 7-piece tablebases, but not 8 pieces.

”After the completion of the 7-man, some people were curious about the feasibility of building the 8-man. Ronald de Man estimated that without modifying much the generator, the task requires computers with 64 TB RAM and 2000 TB hard disks[10] (cost about $640K and $40K respectively in 2020). The generator can be modified to work on much cheaper computers with 64 GB RAM but that may need a few thousand years of computing”

And to solve chess you’d need to calculate the 32-piece tablebases.

[1] https://www.chessprogramming.org/Syzygy_Bases

[teiferer]

Like your sibling comment, you seem to be missing my point. Tablebases are fundamentally enumerating positions explicitly even though they use lots of tricks to make that more efficient. I'm talking about foregoing that entirely.