I didn't imply that it's impossible. I just mean it is silly. Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations. Perhaps you would need to enter your race when you create a Google or Apple account to alleviate this. Or perhaps the vendor has already analyzed the cloud stored pictures of you and your family members, determined the age, race, gender and the resulting family tree and handily preselected the appropriate emoji for you. I mean this is an exaggeration, but that's how ridiculous I think single "human" emojis already are.
If you want to respond in a way that shows who you personally are, send a picture, today's messaging apps together with front and back facing cameras make it easier than ever before. If you want a quick impersonal throwaway response, there's always a yellow emoji. The in-between "catered to you" emojis are an awkward, uncanny middle ground.
What's your point in bringing up combinatorics then?
> Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations.
Imagine using the most trivial kind of UI (literally a LRU cache would do the job) so that emoji you use more often are presented first. In fact, you don't even need to imagine, because this is how they already work on Android.
I have to wonder why you are dedicating so much energy to problematizing uses of emoji that you disapprove of without really seeming to know much of them. If they don't work for you maybe just don't use them?
I'm going to leave this link in the rather forlorn hope that something about it might take root:
If you want to respond in a way that shows who you personally are, send a picture, today's messaging apps together with front and back facing cameras make it easier than ever before. If you want a quick impersonal throwaway response, there's always a yellow emoji. The in-between "catered to you" emojis are an awkward, uncanny middle ground.