Dwarven Theorists

Almost 40 years ago, the Dwarves’ Federation helped the Holy Infernal Empire in the III Axam War, officially ending their neutral position. The two powers always traded with each other, but this political alignment boosted commerce and the exchange of ideas. After a generation in which scholars from both sides understood their terminology and caught up to their discoveries, some crucial breakthroughs happened. The “modern magic” approach of finding the basic rules of Mana interaction, spearheaded by the magic entomologist of the Empire, found fertile ground in the mathematical-minded Dwaven Theorists.
Dwarven scholars of magic are almost all women since the dwarves’ culture is matriarchal, and all the intellectual and abstract (and prestigious) endeavors are deemed feminine. One could say engineers are male, but scientists are females.
Dwarven Theorists looked into applied science and applied magical studies: they designed the constructs and golems that the artificers would then build.
Magic arts are innately holistic: every strand of mana interacts with each other in such complex ways that handle mana as a whole. This has always been a great hurdle to the mass production and easy controlling of constructs: even if the crafting method is standardized every golem has its idiosyncrasies during construction and when commanded, therefore needing a trained artificer to handle them.
With the new perspectives coming from the North, the Theorists are once again tackling the problem of the laws of magic. Their instrument to do that is the Thinking Golem, a construct made not to interact with the world but with the ideas.
The Thinking Golems are usually shaped like boxes that can be held with two hands, they are used to store information, like portable archives, or to make calculations like sophisticated abacuses. There are Thinking Golem able to do more complex tasks and work as magic tools through which they cast spells.
Theorists are creating enormous thinking golem to test their hypotheses. One line of inquiry is to give the cabinet a mechanical hand to make it draw unnumerable variations of a single sigil. The sigils are “stressed” (partially infused with life force) to see if they result in interesting mana configurations. Theorists will look at the configuration and, if they spot an interesting knot, they’ll make the machine draw it. The comparison of the sigils with their resulting knots is the base of a growing systematic classification. It appears that the number of times a mana strand crosses itself is a core characteristic:
Theorists are creating enormous thinking golems, as big as rooms or even as many interconnected rooms, usually underground. These Conjecturing Cabinets automize, at least in part, the comparison and the classification of sigils and knots, offering only meaningful findings and crunching the numbers in advance. Still, magically trained Theorists are needed to work the cabinet. It may not seem so, since their incantations are almost entirely mental, based on visualizing command glyphs: entering these rooms filled with Conjecturing Cabinets you’ll see a group of veiled dwarven women who, apparently, just look at pulsing shapes of light and foldpapers ejected by the machines. Despite their calm and stillness, they are hard-working to unveil the secrets of magic and it’s not uncommon for one of them to pass out of exhaustion.