Equation 8 · Part 3 · How AI Models Learned to Use Tools: A Protocol History
addition
addition
What this part means
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Its job in the formula
Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.
Full expression→addition→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
The assumption a shared protocol is betting on is that the fixed cost of building and maintaining the standard itself is smaller than the integrations it removes, and that those removed integrations were genuinely redundant rather than differently necessary. When M and N are both large and still growing, the gap between M N and M + N dominates every other consideration; when either is small — a single application talking to a handful of tools it controls — a bespoke integration can still be cheaper than adopting a shared protocol at all, and treating standardization as free in that case would be cargo-culting rather than economizing.
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →
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 provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.