Installing Anaconda

You can download Anaconda from the public website: https://www.anaconda.com/download/.

After you've downloaded the setup files, start the installation and follow the instructions to install Anaconda on your computer. You can find the installation instructions at https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/install/.

Anaconda will install a number of utilities on your computer. It will install a new command prompt that will automatically include all the Anaconda executables in your PATH variable. You can quickly manage your Python environment from this command prompt, install packages and, of course, run Python scripts. 

Optionally, you can install Visual Studio Code with your Anaconda installation. Visual Studio Code is a code editor similar to Sublime and Atom and contains a large number of plugins that make it easier to write program code in different programming languages, such as Python.

CNTK 2.6 supports Python 3.6 only, which means that not all distributions of Anaconda will work correctly. You can get an older version of Anaconda through the Anaconda archives at https://repo.continuum.io/archive/. Alternatively, you can downgrade the Python version in your Anaconda installation if you haven't got a version with Python 3.6 included. To install Python 3.6 in your Anaconda environment, open a new Anaconda prompt and execute the following command:

conda install python=3.6