Stochastic Algorithms: Foundations and Applications

SAGA 2001, the ?rst Symposium on Stochastic Algorithms, Foundations and Applications, took place on December 13–14, 2001 in Berlin, Germany. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Stochastic Algorithms: Foundations and Applications, SAGA 2001, held in Berlin, Germany in December 2001. The nine revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are devoted to the design and analysis, experimental evaluation, and real-world application of stochasitc algorithms; in particular, new algorithmic ideas involving stochastic decisions and exploiting probabilistic properties of the underlying problem are introduced. Among the application fields are network and distributed algorithms, local search methods, and computational learning.