[python] What does numpy.random.seed(0) do?

As noted, numpy.random.seed(0) sets the random seed to 0, so the pseudo random numbers you get from random will start from the same point. This can be good for debuging in some cases. HOWEVER, after some reading, this seems to be the wrong way to go at it, if you have threads because it is not thread safe.

from differences-between-numpy-random-and-random-random-in-python:

For numpy.random.seed(), the main difficulty is that it is not thread-safe - that is, it's not safe to use if you have many different threads of execution, because it's not guaranteed to work if two different threads are executing the function at the same time. If you're not using threads, and if you can reasonably expect that you won't need to rewrite your program this way in the future, numpy.random.seed() should be fine for testing purposes. If there's any reason to suspect that you may need threads in the future, it's much safer in the long run to do as suggested, and to make a local instance of the numpy.random.Random class. As far as I can tell, random.random.seed() is thread-safe (or at least, I haven't found any evidence to the contrary).

example of how to go about this:

from numpy.random import RandomState
prng = RandomState()
print prng.permutation(10)
prng = RandomState()
print prng.permutation(10)
prng = RandomState(42)
print prng.permutation(10)
prng = RandomState(42)
print prng.permutation(10)

may give:

[3 0 4 6 8 2 1 9 7 5]

[1 6 9 0 2 7 8 3 5 4]

[8 1 5 0 7 2 9 4 3 6]

[8 1 5 0 7 2 9 4 3 6]

Lastly, note that there might be cases where initializing to 0 (as opposed to a seed that has not all bits 0) may result to non-uniform distributions for some few first iterations because of the way xor works, but this depends on the algorithm, and is beyond my current worries and the scope of this question.