Better late than never

[Tengu459]

Forgive my lack of in-depth experience, but couldn't you use conventional hardware to model alternative hardware, like running an emulator? 

Back in the late 90's my dad brought home software that let us train and model multi-level feed-forward neural networks, on a computer that was using single-processor CPU. Command goals were input using excele-spreadsheet look-alike interfaces. 

It might be bio-centrist of me, but I think early AI's in the timeline would probably operate using neural-networks, since they mimic processes that "natural" organisms use. Hopefully they'd learn like us (humans) and be easier to teach.