Evolving Symbiosis, from Barricelli's Legacy to Collective Intelligence: a simulated and conceptual approach

TL;DR

The implications of symbiogenesis for artifical life and artificial intelligence, and several opportunities for future works are discussed, both at the conceptual level as well as using different substrates (neural networks, neural cellular automata, etc.)

Abstract

This report documents the work of our group (named SymBa) at the ALICE 2026 workshop in Copenhagen. Inspired by the pioneering work by Nils Aall Barricelli on symbiogenesis of numerical organisms (i.e., 1D cellular automata) in 1953 (70+ years ago!!), we discussed the role of symbiogenesis as mechanism contributing to the origins of life, open-endedness, and collective intelligence. We report replications of Barricelli's original work in 1D worlds, an extension to 2D symbioorganisms, and preliminary experimentation with DNA-norms. We discuss the implications of symbiogenesis for artifical life and artificial intelligence, and outline several opportunities for future works, both at the conceptual level as well as using different substrates (neural networks, neural cellular automata, etc.)

Figures (19)

• Figure 1: Extract from original paper by Barricelli published in Italian barricelli1954esempi.
• Figure 2: An emergent symbioorganism from Barricelli's work.
• Figure 3: Example of symbiotic interactions causing mutiple replications that would not have happened without symbiosis.
• Figure 4: Example of emergent crossover.
• Figure 5: Example of emergent crossover.