You can measure research on lots of directions. The purpose of AlphaGo was to win the game, so discussion about AI which are not built to win is largely irrelev

You can measure research on lots of directions. The purpose of AlphaGo was to win the game, so discussion about AI which are not built to win is largely irrelevant. The difficulty of Go had nothing to do with creating tension (where in many games humans play, AI players can trivially win if the designers wanted them to). In Go this was not the case, as AI lagged behind grandmaster play significantly. Thus, the discussion of research that interests you that has nothing to do with the goals of Go AI, is tangential at best. It's not fair to say the article is faulty just because you wanted them to discuss your favorite research conference.