Solution: Social Pathology

Answer: DEEP END

Written by Jonah Ostroff

Each puzzle in the Sociology department uses parts of the profiles of two fish. This puzzle uses the grid of swimmers from Hammerhead’s Instaclam page, and seven clips from Tuna’s Codify page.

Hammerhead’s page features a picture of a grid containing region boundaries, swimmer emojis, a start and goal, and some highlighted spaces. The text says to follow Haisu rules, but haisu normally contains numeric clues, and this picture doesn’t have any.

The grid contains seven regions, and seven song clips on Tuna’s page contain lyrics “nth time” for some n. Since haisu clues tell on which trip to a region the path must visit the clue, it makes sense to interpret these as the missing haisu clues. But which one goes where?

The text also says that “humans always hang out in an area that perfectly fits them”. The haisu regions have sizes 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15, which are exactly the lengths of the names of the artists for these songs:

Once the clues are assigned to swimmers, the haisu has a unique solution. The main observation is that the 4 (from Prince) can only be achieved if all 8 borders of the region are crossed, and the 10 (from The Offspring) requires many short visits to the room—the upper-left section requires either one visit of length 3, or two visits of length 2, which means every other cell must be part of a visit of length 1.

Once the haisu is solved, the artist names can be used to extract. Since each artist’s name is equal to the size of the region, it’s possible to write the artist names in the cells of the grid in the order that the path visits them:

The letters in the yellow squares along the path spell the answer, DEEP END.