Topic 7: MCP and A2A

Learning Goals

• Understand the principles of Model Context Protocol

• Be able to write a program that uses MCP to run remote Asta tools from AI2

• Understand the principles of agent to agent communication using the A2A protocol

• Learn how to use ngrok to run process that communicate through firewalls

Tasks

1. Setup:

   1. Make sure you have ASTA_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY defined in your environment. See the email I sent to the class.

   2. Find your partner(s) for this week. Introduce yourselves!

   3. Run test_ngrok.sh on your laptop and make sure it works when running in the university wireless network. If you run into problems, please check with other students, the TA, or Claude. We will be using ngrok for the Thursday class.

2. MCP lesson plan and tasks

3. A2A lesson plan and tasks

   • a2a_agent_template.py

   • a2a_test.py

   • a2a_trivia.py

   • A2a_registry.py

Resources

• test_ngrok.sh - run this to install ngrok on your system and check that it is running

• Topic 7 partners

• Lecture slides

• Trace of quiz tournament

• Semantic similarity code to replace TF-IDF

Portfolio

Create a subdirectory in your GitHub portfolio named Topic7MCP and save your programs, each modified version named to indicate its task number/letter and purpose. Create appropriately named text files saving the outputs from your terminal sessions running the programs. Create README.md with a table of contents of the directory and a summary and discussion of what you discovered.