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

A research team named SymBa, including James Ashford and Stefano Nichele, has published a report from the ALICE 2026 workshop, revisiting a 70-year-old concept in digital evolution. The work is inspired by Nils Aall Barricelli's 1953 experiments, where he used 1D cellular automata to simulate 'numerical organisms' that could evolve through symbiosis and cooperation, a process known as symbiogenesis. The team successfully replicated these foundational experiments and extended them into more complex 2D environments, creating 'symbioorganisms' and experimenting with DNA-norms to govern their interactions.

This conceptual exploration challenges the dominant paradigms in AI, which often focus on competition and optimization. By studying how digital life forms can evolve collectively through mutual benefit, the research opens new avenues for understanding open-ended evolution and developing collective intelligence. The authors outline future opportunities to apply these principles to modern substrates like neural networks and neural cellular automata, suggesting a path toward more adaptive, cooperative, and potentially more creative artificial systems.