Will ChatGPT Express Itself with Emojis❓

©Pantheon (TV series)

If you've watched the American sci-fi TV series "Pantheon", which is based on a series of short stories by Chinese-American writer Ken Liu, you might remember a scene where Ellen discovers that Maddie is chatting with a stranger who sends a line of emojis:

👄❓👨👄💏🌎🌍🌏❓🙋‍♂️❓

These emojis can be interpreted as a visual representation of the poem “What lips my lips have kissed and where and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay . Spoiler alert: the “stranger” is Ellen’s deceased husband, who had his brain transplanted into a machine before he died (similar to the movie Transcendence starring Johnny Depp). He/it is communicating with his family through a computer…

©Pantheon (TV series)

Recently, I’ve been reading the classic book Design Patterns on software engineering. I like to take electronic notes while reading, and I’m also a big fan of emojis. So, when I wanted to add an emoji to represent the concept of design patterns, I wondered, “Hum, can ChatGPT help me with that?🤔”

I asked ChatGPT:

As an expert in design thinking, user interface, and design patterns in software engineering, what is the emoji that best represents the essence?

ChatGPT replied

While there is no specific emoji that directly represents the concept of ‘Design Pattern’ in software development, the 🧩 emoji (puzzle piece) could be a good representation. Design patterns can be thought of as individual pieces that fit together to create a larger, cohesive structure or solution. Each pattern can be seen as a piece of the larger puzzle, and when put together, they form a complete picture. In this way, the 🧩 emoji could be used to represent the idea of design patterns in software development.

I was surprised by this answer, as I hadn’t thought of using 🧩 before. ChatGPT’s response also resonated with an important sentence in the book: “Favor object composition over class inheritance” (p17, Chapter 1, Design Patterns. This means that in object-oriented programming, one should avoid over-relying on inheritance and instead use object composition to combine different modules.

For example, in industrial software, the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern is commonly used:

Model: the data stored in the software, such as numbers a, b, and c
View: the window that displays the data to the user
Controller: how the user interacts with the software, such as through dragging or keyboard input

In this framework, a large software system is broken down into smaller modules (puzzle pieces) that work together.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing technology that can generate human-readable text. Emojis are symbols that can convey emotions and intentions, and sometimes replace text. Although they seem unrelated, they both relate to human communication and understanding. We haven’t yet reached the era of artificial general intelligence (AGI), but this coincidence is interesting and impressive…

The fact that a scene from a novel and TV show coincided with my real-life experience is quite fascinating! 😊

Note

This post was originally written in Chinese and translated to English via meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The last emoji 😊 was not included in my original text but was added by LLM🤣.