Introduction

The last several years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of neurobiologists building or using computer-based models as a regular part of their efforts to understand how different neural systems function (Eeckman and Bower 1993, Bower 1992). As experimental data continue to be amassed, it is increasingly clear that detailed physiological and anatomical data alone are not enough to infer how neural circuits work. Experimentalists appear to be recognizing the need for the quantitative approach to exploring the functional consequences of particular neuronal features that is provided by modeling. This combination of modeling and experimental work has led to the creation of the new discipline of computational neuroscience (Eeckman and Bower 1993).