I think it is more likely they said "It isn't a well-defined problem."
Perhaps they really answered "as the problem is stated, it can't be done, without compromises."
Then again, I tend to give computer scientists and statisticians the benefit of the doubt (and not so much the writer).
I might even have left the latter sentence out, since it's clearly implicit. Maybe whoever they found left it out or maybe they didn't even consider it, but the artist could have made the addition too. I suspect the first few people just weren't interested.
It's possible that any academic asked might have concluded that there wasn't a general publishable result to be had from this work and therefore that it wasn't worth doing. Just because something is interesting doesn't necessarily mean it is of any interest from a research perspective.
[NB I left academic research in CS for pretty much these reasons - I like interesting stuff].
Then somebody actually talked to him and took the time to realize he didn't need the optimal solution.
Isn't that a tautology? Because if it wasn't doable then it wouldn't be practical.
Really? Wtf kind of incompetents were arguing that it couldn't be done?
I'm not arguing that it was or should have been easy, of course. It sounds like a fascinating challenge. And I'm also not claiming that any computer scientist, even a good one, could have solved it. But any vaguely competent computer scientist should have been able to say, "that's a cool problem, and you need to talk to a graph drawing expert."
Of course, this could have been a case of the source saying "they said it was hard" and the writer mangling that into "they said it couldn't be done". But still.