[ajb]

Indeed. When Knuth found was informed of this problem in a random number generator of his, he fixed it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3730348

There is an obvious use case for this: you have a test which is run N times where you want to have different random numbers in each run, but you also want to be able to go to run X and debug it without running all the previous ones.

[tedunangst]

Did you intend to link to this page? I'm already here.

[ajb]

Crap, no, and it's too late to edit. I intended to link to: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news02.html#rng

Thanks.