Google Deep Mind Rating

Nice observation. In 2014 I certainly hadn't thought of that.

And yeah, seems we agree.

They are surely at fault for not sending you an e-mail to explain that a match is not a game.

Too subtle?  Ok.

This article you linked does the exact same thing Google did, by hyping TCEC Cup-2 as "single elimination" in a misleading way to make the format seem more exciting, by lying about it.  Oh, sorry, I guess I should just call it "Marketing" instead of misleading, even though these terms are pretty much interchangeable at a functional level.  Alpha Zero is to official match as TCEC Cup-2 is to single elimination.

Western society has reached a dangerous milestone where outright lying in advertising is expected and accepted as the norm.  At its most basic level, fraud is defined by motivation, not by degree of how many people are mislead or care that they were mislead.

It's a knockout tournament involving matches. Rather like the later stages of the FIDE WCC and somewhat better at determining the true best player but with some luck when players are of similar standard.

While it was tenable to argue that the first match conditions handicapped Stockfish enough to make it unclear it had been beaten (I did not believe so: I thought the result would prove genuinely indicative of relative strength), the later match answered all those questions and confirmed AlphaZero is significantly superior (remember it won even with 1/10 as much time as Stockfish).

Exactly.

I haven't seen any of the games played, so I don't know what happened. How did AlphaZero win? (mate, time, etc.) 

It really doesn't matter if you disagree with #2, if #1 is true.  If the games are private, we can argue til kingdom come...that's the whole point.  There will never be proof until A0's team does it right, ala Leela.

While the critics of the match logistics have an excellent claim, the larger point for me was the beautiful way that AlphaZero won its games.  They were incredible.

Could the Google DeepMind team have AlphaZero win the same way against a fully hardware optimized, gigantic hash table, opening book, and everything else that the Stockfish development team wants?

Who knows?  But it would be fun to see!!

The second match provided a 32Gb hash table, opening books and the same fast hardware as TCEC (44 core). It was only slightly different to the first match. Any further changes would have less effect.

Stockfish' best shot might be to use intensive computing power to develop a drawing book and hope it could do well enough to hang on against the superior player.

Although... out of (IIRC) 1300 games (there were open specific matches totaling 1200 games) they only released those 10 wins. Sure some of them were amazing, but we saw <1%

We should remember A0 only scored ~65% which is only good enough for a 100 Elo gap. Sure they showed us some spectacular wins, but most games were drawn.

The larger point for me was that neural networks are interesting and a little scary. Remember A0 is not a chess engine, it was also the best at go and shogi.

They sure published more thatn 10. There is more than then games in the book "the game changer" with analysis 

And it is not all amazing. For instance A0 can make tactical bluenders unlike traditional engines. but there is 220 games for you to look

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=160016

Yeah, they released more later.

It's amazing that these neural networks (more information available on Leela) are known to be not very strong tactically, but hardly suffer (because they don't tend to get into situations where they are at risk of a tactical coup, or perhaps needing one in a timely fashion). Exactly the opposite of the early engines (only way stronger). Any weaknesses left in the top engines are all positional in nature.