anyone?
Should computer engines be outlawed when they prove chess a draw?

What if they prove it's a forced win for white with perfect play? The computer power to prove either premise has been estimated (don't ask me for a source other than my often unreliable memory) to still be about 100 years away. Even then the lines will be so long and complicated that the unveiled "truth" of chess will have very little to do with the way humans play.

Point number one: WTF.
Point number two: Games can be weakly solved or strongly solved. Weakly solving a game means proving a winning or drawing strategy exists, which has no impact whatsoever on the game itself. Suppose the perfect game starts 1.e4 e5. If you play 1.e4 and your opponent answers with 1...c5 your knowledge of the drawing strategy is useless. All you know is that 1...c5 is inferior, but that doesn't help you actually playing the game.
On the other hand, strongly solving a game means knowing exactly what is the outcome from every legal position assuming perfect play from both positions. Strongly solving chess would mean producing a "32-men tablebase". But that isn't happening. Not now, not in a billion years. There are more chess positions than atoms in the universe.
The closest you can get is a "quantum oracle" that given a position outputs "1-0", "0-1" or "1/2-1/2" with several nines of confidence, without actually calculating anything, therefore being useless for actually playing the game.
In other words, chess playing computers are as strong as they will ever be, improvements are going to be evolutions (better algorithms, better hardware) and not revolutions (completely new conceptions).

???
Chess is draw on move 1. The whole point of the game is comparing the ability of both players to prove this draw.

I don't think chess will ever be solved.
Consider this: There are more chess positions possible than there are atoms in the universe.
We would need to not only find all of those possibilities, but evaluate them as well. I think that we'll solve the meaning of life with a computer before we solve chess with one.
Well all masters+ would have to play Go then as thier job computer ain't beating pro go players any time soon with its infinite possibilties ( yes the ko rule make it decrease from infifniti to smaller amount but excluding that plus if you add superko then it is limitied as multi ko fights can also be done for ever)

Yes, ignorance is a great life strategy, so it would be better to outlaw computers right now, before they discover something we might not like ;-)
I will answer your question with two links:
http://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php/Fewest_Moves
Solving chess with years of strong quantum CPU processing won't mean we will be able to build a computer that play the best move for the given position in a reasonable time.

Philisophicly, this is a very interesting question. Because there's alot of variables to consider, not unlike the process of thinking out a chess move( can you hear the clock?). Not to oversimplify ..., but we must to process all the imformation. I believe we assume chess to be a draw because it perserves the idea of chance. Who would want to play a game that is known to be already lost? Unless, they are merely fooling themselves... Which brings me to my next point, All intelligent players regardless of thier playing level or ability will & must come to the conclusion that all chess positions & solutions are the search for truth. The computer has an inate ability to do this through sheer whrote calculation & mechanical brute strength. But, it cannot think ( I can hear the typewriter keys clicking already!). To deny the use of a computer to do what it is designed to do is to deny progress. Why? are we afraid to find the truth & what it means? Or are we as humans afraid to find out that we are inferior to computers when it comes to chess? ( Ouch! was that your ego or mine?). The bottom line for me is, to deny truth because it comes from a contravercial source is to lie to oneself but, to deny yourself the ability to judge & to reason amoung yourself & aply that decision is also wrong. Chess should always be a contest between two people & legally confined to the appropriate rules that aply to the form they wish to play. It doesn't matter if we ban the computer now or later, it's the search for truth that counts & worse come to worse I know where the plug is...
Should computer engines be outlawed when they prove chess a draw?