  We investigate the possibility of selecting heavy ion collision events with
certain features in the initial state ("event engineering"). Anisotropic flow
measurements in heavy ion reactions have confirmed the almost ideal fluid
dynamical behaviour of the hot and dense quark gluon plasma state. As a
consequence, it is intriguing to pursue the idea of selecting collisions with a
certain special initial geometry, e.g., a large ellipsoidal or triangular
deformation, by classifying events by the value of their final observed flow
coefficients. This procedure could be especially interesting for azimuthally
dependent jet energy loss studies. We investigate the correlation between
initial state features and final state momentum space anisotropies within an
event-by-event hybrid approach. We find that the finite particle number and
hadronic rescattering of the final state leads to large event-by-event
fluctuations in the observables that could be used to characterize the features
of the initial state. This makes event engineering by final state selection
difficult.
