motd.co
Emoji Sorter
I made a website today that lets you enter an ordered set of emoji and see how those would be lexographically sorted by many programming languages/computing platforms. It's here:
Emoji Sorter
Below is the full story of why I made this, and at the very end I added a small puzzle I haven't yet found a solution to despite making this 😅
I was trying to solve a problem today, which was that I would like to use a set of emoji to force-sort some recurring playlists I make in Apple Music. The playlist... list in the various places can't be manually organized, only sorted by various criteria, and I want each year, over the course of the year, to have four playlists in the root area: one for "spring", one for "summer", one for "fall", and one for "winter", in that order. When I move the playlists into an overarching folder at the end of the year, I want them to sort by year, then by season in the specified order.
I've gone back and forth on ways to accomplish this, but right now the playlists are titled things like "2023 - (2) Summer". I hate it having that (2) in there, but it forces the order I want, so I've put up with it.
Today it occurred to me that maybe I could figure out a set of 4 emoji that, when the playlist view is set to "alphabetical order", would work to sort things in the correct season order. But as I started browsing my phone's emoji picker trying to pick evocative emoji, I discovered something distressing: the emoji picker's order is not the order of codepoints in Unicode.
I probably would have known that, if I had stopped to think about it first; it's a combination of the fact that new Unicode are being added all the time and they get inserted into Unicode based on one justification, some combination of technical and cultural, then adopted by platforms and inserted into their user-facing emoji pickers and their usual "categories" system based on many more cultural and business decisions.
And of course there's the fact that "an emoji" is not a single "character". Lots of emoji as they're displayed on our screen are a combination of pieces of data, like combining emoji depicting human bodies with modifiers to create skin tones, or methods to make things like "hundreds of country's flags" work. So anything trying to analyze the 'sorting' method would have to take that into account.
On my lunch break today I decided to knock out a small site that would let me help figure this out. So I built Emoji Sorter and poked around. I asked around a bit and never got a very satisfying answer:
What set of four emoji, lexographically sorted, best represent the seasons in the order "spring", "summer", "fall", "winter"?
I'm not actually sure there is a solution that I will be satisfied with, but if you feel like giving it a try, go for it.
Also:
what other "puzzles" could you try to solve using this tool? Explaining the plot of a movie, in lexographic order? Abstractly representing an artist's career? Telling the best story?