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Kohonen neural nets are some kind of competitive nets. The most commonly known variants are the Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) and the Learning Vector Quantisation (LVQ). The former model uses an unsupervised learning, the latter is an efficient classifier.

This paper tries to give, in simple words, a clear idea about the basis of competitive neural nets and competitive learning emphasizing on the SOMs and some of their real-world applications. It should not be considered as an exhaustive reference but as a simple introductory.