Heritage of FIPA-ACL and Speech Acts
Before MCP, before A2A, there was FIPA-ACL. In 2000 the IEEE Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents ratified an agent communication language with twenty performatives, two content languages, and a set of interaction protocols — contract net, subscribe/notify, request-when. It faded from industry because the ontology overhead was too heavy for the web, but the LLM revival of multi-agent systems is quietly reimplementing the same ideas without the formal semantics: JSON contracts stand in for performatives, natural language stands in for ontologies. This lesson reads FIPA-ACL seriously so you can see which 2026 protocol decisions are reinvention, which are novelty, and where the current wave is going to rediscover problems the 2000s already solved.
This lesson isn’t interactive yet.
It is part of the curriculum and will get the same treatment as Phase 1 — a visual cover, hands-on labs, derivations with numeric checks and a quiz. Until then, the original lesson is the best place to read it:
Part of Phase 16 — Multi-Agent & Swarms. Use the previous / next cards below to keep browsing the phase.