I want to initialize a network with some random connectivity, following some standard connectivity rules, like is achieved by standard use of the nest.Connect function.Then I want to make several runs of this network, with the same connectivity.  I learned however that this is not a straightforward thing to do repeated runs of the same network in NEST.

Although I saw different solutions online, it is not clear that there is a 'standard' solution for how to achieve this goal of just initializing the network with the same connectivity several times, which seems fairly simple. This link here, for example, shows how to store and restore a network, but it seems like overshoot for my purpose (the described problem is a network with plasticity). I also thought of creating a network, extract the connectivity, and then impose this connectivity in new networks, following what is explained here in the 'Connecting sparse matrices with array indexing' section, but it's a bit tedious to implement (I started implementing it) and error prone.

The alternative I'm thinking of now is to just re create the network on each pass of my loop with standard NEST functions, but giving the same random seed to NEST before making the connectivity each time. After the connectivity is done, I'd pass a new random seed, sampled from numpy's random number generator, and so each simulation would be a different repeat.

I was wondering whether this very simple approach I propose would work, or whether I'm missing something.

Thanks