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

James Ashford; Marko Cvjetko; Richard Löffler; Berfin Sakallioglu; Alessandro Valerio; Marta Tataryn; Benedikt Hartl; Léo Pio-Lopez; Stefano Nichele

arXiv · 2603.08463

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

James Ashford·Marko Cvjetko·Richard Löffler·Berfin Sakallioglu·Alessandro Valerio·Marta Tataryn·Benedikt Hartl·Léo Pio-Lopez·Stefano Nichele

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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.)

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James Ashford, Marko Cvjetko, Richard Löffler, Berfin Sakallioglu, Alessandro Valerio, Marta Tataryn, Benedikt Hartl, Léo Pio-Lopez, Stefano Nichele. 2026-03-09. Evolving Symbiosis, from Barricelli's Legacy to Collective Intelligence: a simulated and conceptual approach. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08463

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