Charles Babbage

Resilient Spellwrangler Charles Babbage is a tier 4 Professional belonging to the Labyrinth Studies Archives

A spellcaster and a scholar of high repute, Babbage is regularly consulted despite his young age, both by the British Government and various Professionals. A leading theoretician on Professions, he's an expert on the topic of builds.

He's trying to design a mechanical build-maker that could - in theory - derive quickly a build path given any Professional objective, but the problems of recursion causes him difficulties so far.

Historical Notes

Yes. He's The Charles Babbage. No middle name, by the way; there's no recorded middle name on either baptism certificate or obituary. Babbage was a polymath and extremely smart man - assuredly an Intelligence Potential of 20.

In this altered history, he almost certainly shortened his studies or even did not attend Cambridge. As any of the bright promising students, he'd have been sent to the Great Gate to see if he qualified, in an era where Professional recruitment was hit-and-miss. Once he landed in Grailburg's Plaza, he would have started to explore the rules of the Labyrinth and spend a lot of time there rather than the college. He's formalized various theories of the Professional development, although he remains stymied in his theories of Plaza location ("it looks so random, it must have a rule").

And, of course, I have him trying to make a mechanical build-maker. Deriving a build for a Professional can take multiple hours. So, just like he went to attempt to make a Difference Engine to calculate polynomials, he could have tried to make a path optimizer to solve that in minutes. Which, alas, is far more complicated than it looks (it's an optimization problem... and it took the 20th century to tackle those).

If you are looking for the other person usually associated with him, Countess Ada Lovelace... well, she would have been probably a handful bundle of a 3-year old at the moment, and will almost certainly not exist in this altered reality. No Babbage and Lovelace adventures in the Labyrinth.