Well, same as anything. It sounds like they weren't seriously looking for counterexamples, they were looking for a starter project to "implement" the hypothesis

Well, same as anything. It sounds like they weren't seriously looking for counterexamples, they were looking for a starter project to "implement" the hypothesis and generate a nice chart to illustrate the property. It wouldn't have been a failure if that's all they'd produced, they would have moved on to the next thing.