The companies may have plenty of resources but those resources were not solely dedicated to this problem. You mention Facebook and they were indeed on the verge

The companies may have plenty of resources but those resources were not solely dedicated to this problem. You mention Facebook and they were indeed on the verge of putting time into this with - though their team is far smaller (1-2 people) and they still used less compute resources. From the linked Miles article: "Facebook’s darkfmcts3 is the only version I know of that definitely uses GPUs, and it uses 64 GPUs in the biggest version and 8 CPUs (so, more GPUs than single machine AlphaGo, but fewer CPUs). ... Darkfmcts3 achieved a solid 5d ranking, a 2-3 dan improvement over where it was just a few months earlier..."