Equation 2 · How AI Models Learned to Use Tools: A Protocol History
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Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
both large and still growing, the gap between M N and M + N dominates every other consideration. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
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Symbol N
both large and still growing, the gap between M N and M + N dominates every other consideration.
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What the article says around this equation
That parallel is precise enough to formalize, and doing so exposes the actual economic assumption both protocols are making rather than merely asserting it. Let M be the number of distinct hosts — editors, for LSP; agent frameworks and model-serving applications, for MCP — and N be the number of distinct targets — languages, for LSP; tools and data sources, for MCP. Wiring every host to every target independently, the way plugins and early framework wrappers did, requires
Sources cited in the article section
- [10] Introducing the Model Context Protocol ↗
- [11] Specification ↗
- [12] JSON-RPC 2.0 Specification ↗
- [13] Language Server Protocol ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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