A friend told me that a few years ago a super computer was close to discovering a force win for white so the company who owned the computer shut it down,can anyone confirm this?

You could have said it a little nicer Im only a kid but thanks anyway.

I think every sound line is a forced draw.  Yes, my definition of "sound" is generous enough to include the Grob and Borg.  Chess will probably be solved in my lifetime =(

oh and pfren what is your source?

Look i have tried to be nice to you but you keep insulting my intellegence so just stop,and any time soon seems to suggest that you think it's possible.

The story is fake because any company smart enough to create a super computer that powerful would be smart enough to not shut it down and instead collect extortion money from the FIDE in exchange for not releasing it onto the market. 

you mean non-existant and maybe you should worry about your pos country instead of a kid on the internet.think about that as your changing your diaper tonight.

Wikipedia has a quite interesting article on this subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess

It also describes the opinions of several experts on if and when chess will be solved. They all agree that it will take a long time if it is even possible.

Thanks Laemond!

Ah yes his greek friends to the rescue, afraid to admit there nationality!

There definitely should be no debate whether it is possible or not. There are very clearly a finite number of chess positions to analyze. For an easy upper bound consider on each square the possibilites there could be a white piece of any type a black piece of any type or no piece so since there are 6 types of pieces that means there are surely less than 13^64 legal positions. Due to the draw by repetition rule any game must have less than 3x(13^64) ply or half moves (but since most games end in under 100 moves in calculating all possible games up to 100 moves would give us a very close idea to what perfect play entails at least from the starting position) . So given an upper bound for the length of games (obviously a much lower bound can be given by the 50 move rule) it is clear we can enumerate all possible chess games by the current rules since in each position there are a finite number of moves. This allows us to easily to decide which of these games are draws or wins and losses and therefore solve chess. Obviously whether we can develop a computer with the brute force calcualtion speed to calculate such data in the forseeable future is another question.

Once again - if a supercomputer solves chess, why do you think that's going to automatically give you the same ability as said computer? 

It won't.  A computer may "solve" chess one day, but no one person will.

Ah pfren, always as awkward.

according to the law yes i'm still a child i just thought he should know that before he got too rude,and nice stalk on my account.

Seconded. Connect 4 is a solved game (you can even find a paper with the proof online) but it still gets played over the board for fun because it is too complicated for a human to memorize/understand all winning lines.

all i can say is class with a capital "K", wha?