What caused our existence? What is the purpose of life? What are we? Our existence is inherently egoistic, as we only perceive things, that we feel. Everything else, might not even exist, but everything we feel is reliant on things we do not feel, as without our parent's past we might not exist at all. So it is not surprising, that everything to do with oneself has to do with others. Even the act of formulating ones thoughts is reliant on the language created by other for others.

Some may define symbiosis as living together of beings, but what does this mean and what are the consequences? Why is it so easy to understand, but so hard to grasp? In this project we try to define and explore symbiosis from the perspective of computer science.

In IT source code has a special place. Other than many other things, program source code is something were many people can work on one thing together and influence each other via information dynamically, on unusually large scale.

Let's take a book as a counterpoint, where often many people are working together, in order to publish a single book, but were only a handful of authors exist. Yes, there are exceptions, but these are probably very few. What probably will occur a lot more often, is other people translating the text or creating fan fiction. Further continuing the main and canon story happens relatively rarely. Additionally, fan fictions most probably won't reference each other, which together create a larger piece of work. In short, all related authors are only relatively loosely coupled. See great works like the Bible or The Lord of the Rings, for example.

In the software world, an extreme example is Linux, where about 14,000 programmers contributed to Linux until June 2015 (citation of 2025-07-14). 14,000 people authoring a bundle of mostly text, that references each other. Also, many people create software, that specifically runs on Linux. For such applications to continue to work on Linux, these need to track and adapt to changes in the Linux kernel. Some app developers even introduce changes into the kernel, in order to improve the performance or new required functionality. In short, many in IT many things are interdependent to each other over a long period of time.

1. todo

How does one model living beings mathematically in order to reason about it? Life seems to be mainly focused on self-sustaining and reproduction. A straight forward approach to formulate this mathematically is to define this focus as an optimization that maximizes self-sustaining of every existing living instance and to maximize the amount of living instances. As we are just starting this journey, the weighting between these goals is considered to be unknown or random for now.

We now have a semantic starting point and goal. If the definition turns out to be false, we will adapt it together, if not we were lucky. So, let's get started and see where the voyage will take us.