GeorgeH

I have never purchased a violin from T2, but I have sold a few violin and bows in it, some very very good and one very not so good. No, but it would not be hard to do, particularly if you're choosing violins based on them "looking playable." Buying at an auction is a gamble. The less you know, the higher your risk is of losing your bet. And do a search on "the winner's curse." I think you'd be better served by going to a good dealer. And this is important: Buying a violin together with your child can be an unforgettably joyful experience and a priceless memory for both of you.

Exactly. And the internet is forever. Thanks.

It looks like a nice violin in good condition, and not Markneukirchen production. In the pre-war period, violins made by individual American makers tended to be sold locally with the exceptions being some makers near major distribution centers (New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, etc) or who had their violins marketed, sold, and shipped nationwide by big music houses. The auctioneer is correct - lesser-known or unknown American maker do not realize high prices in auction regardless of the quality of their work. (BTW, if the violin is not yours and the pictures are not public, then it really isn't ethical to post pictures of somebody else's violin in a public forum without their knowledge and permission.)

@Alix You need to loosen the hairs of the bow by twisting the metal adjustor at the end. Keeping the bow tight all the time will ruin the camber and/or bow straightness. The bow should be tightened before and then loosened after each time you play with it.

Reminds me of a tiger-skin rug.

Poor Mario gets no respect.

A distribution does not have to be pre-coded. It can be developed by the machine programed to learn from large data sets. That is part of the point. Human beings can't predict what that distribution is going to look like. The quants who built the software for the ultra-successful Medallion Fund said that they ultimately could not explain why their software executed the trades that it did; all they knew was that it was wildly successful. But before they built it, all the security traders told them that a computer could never beat a human being at trading, and they were wasting their time. But in the end, they built an application that learned to identify and execute successful trading opportunities from huge amounts of data, which beat all human-managed funds by wide margins. The human beings who wrote the application couldn't tell you what their application was discovering through regression analysis and learning to trade on; they only knew that it worked most of the time. The rest of your paragraph regarding machine errors due to rounding errors and technical challenges is all true, but human brains are also subject to their own operational challenges such as lack of sleep, low glucose levels, low oxygen, etc. We can also be inspired by random inputs, such as Isaac Newton's famous apple falling from a tree. Probably not. It seems to me that the fundamental thrust of your argument is that machines can't be "intelligent" because they don't have conscious volition, and they don't have volition because they are designed, built, and programmed by humans, who do have conscious volition. And even if AI machines appear to have conscious volition, it can only and forever be a simulacra. Do I have that right?

Probably not. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7569982/

Yes, in fact, studies of the brains of accomplished string players have been shown that their brains are physically different from non-musicians.

When under general anesthesia, the brain may lose its embodied awareness of sensations, but brain electrical activity only slows dramatically, it does not cease, hence, the mind does not cease either. Altogether interesting comment, @jezzupe

You're in good company. That the universe is a holograph was posited in detail by David Bohm, one of the most influential and significant physicists of the 20th Century. Kind of a silly analogy. Unlike human brains and AI machines, dump trucks have not been hardwired and programmed to learn. They cannot be taught. They are purely mechanical devices. AI machines are not simply calculators. Two identical AI machines with the same programming and teaching input will most likely not give identical answers when asked, for example, to write an essay on a complex subject. In fact, the same machine will likely not write the same identical essay twice. Emotions are hardwired into the human (and other animals') brain. Certainly newly born babies experience emotions. This has further been proven such as by people who have suffered brain damage through stroke or trauma who afterward can no longer experience emotions though they otherwise appear "normal." However, on top of the physical brain structures processing emotions, emotional responses are also learned experiences, too. There is no rational reason that human emotions and emotional responses can't be learned and expressed by an AI machine that is hardwired and programmed to learn them. What human beings are learning is that machines can be created that think and learn like biological entities only much faster and with much greater memory. The design of the biological brain is contained in DNA; the design of the electronic brain is in the microprocessors. These are physical observable "things." Carbon-based DNA is not conscious, but it certainly drives its reproduction through creatures that do appear to be conscious. No reason silicon microprocessors with robotic bodies couldn't eventually do the same thing, but their evolution has the potential to be much much faster than animals. As far as we know, the "mind" cannot be separated from a physical working brain. Despite its slowness, the human brain's advantage over machines has been its massive parallel processing capabilities, but we are uncovering the algorithms of the brain, and our computing speed is catching up to the parallel processing capabilities. Quantum computing promise to vastly exceed it. And if a machine eventually exhibits all the behaviors of being conscious, even genuinely emotional, who is to say that it is just simulacra?

It is learning, but instead of using biological neural nets, it uses artificial neural networks which simulate how the human brain learns. The dendrites of biological neurons are essentially binary in their communications with other neurons. They are either "on" (releasing neurotransmitters across synapses to other neurons) or "off" (not releasing neurotransmitters). In the future, quantum computing will go beyond today's binary computer systems, and will be capable of solving complex problems in human time-scales that are unsolvable in real time with either the human brain or binary-based computers.

The string grooves in the top look a bit too deep, too.

Me, too. Thank you for contributing.