Mainly because reviewers won't accept uninteresting results. In many fields it's hard to differentiate a negative result from just a clumsy researcher. In compu

Mainly because reviewers won't accept uninteresting results. In many fields it's hard to differentiate a negative result from just a clumsy researcher. In computer science a negative result usually generates a flood of questions like "okay, but why would you do it like that, couldn't you try this or that etc." and the conclusion is that the researcher just didn't manage to get it to work because they didn't use the right techniques. Essentially you'd have to argue that the method you tried should work, based on what we already know, but surprisingly it doesn't work. This type of argument is very hard to carry through. The opposite is much more publication friendly: "nobody would have thought that this could ever work like this, but we now show that this novel idea does work very well". That's the type of thing for award-winning research.