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

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of symbiogenesis inspired by Barricelli's early work, extending it to 2D and DNA-norms, and discusses implications for artificial life and collective intelligence.

Contribution

It replicates and extends Barricelli's symbiogenesis experiments to 2D and introduces preliminary DNA-norm experiments, linking symbiogenesis to artificial intelligence.

Findings

Successful replication of Barricelli's 1D symbiogenesis experiments

Extension to 2D symbioorganisms demonstrated feasibility

Preliminary DNA-norm experiments suggest new research directions

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.)