Hardware manufacturers actually have to deal with this issue these days. An awful lot of chip fabrication is done via stochastic / heuristic / monte carlo meth

Hardware manufacturers actually have to deal with this issue these days. An awful lot of chip fabrication is done via stochastic / heuristic / monte carlo methods for any large chip; rather than exhaustively laying out the whole chip by hand, hardware devs describe the chip in a constraints language and feed it to a fabrication program (often with some additional parameters like "optimize speed" or "minimize power consumption / heat generation"). Then the program outputs the chip schematic to be fabricated. Unless you save the random seed at every step, it's entirely possible to end up with the problem that you have a schematic, but if you lose it you'll never get the program to fabricate exactly that schematic again (because hundreds or thousands of precise schematics solve the problem well enough to terminate the monte carlo search).