SAGA 2001, the ?rst Symposium on Stochastic Algorithms, Foundations and Applications, took place on December 13-14, 2001 in Berlin, Germany. The present volume comprises contributed papers and four invited talks that were included in the ?nal program of the symposium. Stochastic algorithms constitute a general approach to ?nding approximate solutions to a wide variety of problems. Although there is no formal proof that stochastic algorithms perform better than deterministic ones, there is evidence by empirical observations that stochastic algorithms produce for a broad range of applications...