Since one may use different platforms, we documented approaches and experiences of our installations.

QISKit Installation for Windows (method 1)

1. Download and install Anaconda 3 here.
2. Then, closely follow this tutorial.Notes:

•  Upgrade QISKit following step 2 of the tutorial. Make sure that it is indeed upgraded by entering pip show qiskit in the conda prompt, after activation and compare it to the latest version of QISKit found here. If this command didn’t properly upgrade QISKit to the latest version, try pip install -U qiskit instead, and check it again.
•  The image of circuits (it’s just an image, nothing else) as of today are produced by latex (hence it is required to install MikTex on your computer in the above tutorial). However, it seems that there is no need to install “poppler” manually as explained in the tutorial anymore since now it comes automatically.
• When upgrading QISKit, one may encounter the following error:

  Cannot uninstall 'sympy'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.

  The solution is to use pip install --ignore-installed sympy or any other package name that appears in the error message instead of sympy.

QISKit Installation for Windows (method 2)

One can also install linux environment under Windows 10 (i.e. the Windows Subsystem for Linux), and we have tried the Ubuntu distribution. For the steps of installation, see here from Microsoft or here from Ubuntu.com. Make sure your Windows 10 is up-to-date and your Ubuntu version is 16.04 (you might get 14.04 for an older Windows 10 OS Build).

Once you have that, you might want to sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade to update your Ubuntu. Then you have to install python3: sudo apt install python3 and sudo apt install python3-pip for the python package management. Then you can install Qiskit: sudo -H pip3 install qiskit, which should install dependent packages. You also need to install Jupyter in order to use python notebook: sudo -H pip3 install jupyter. You may need to install poppler: sudo apt install poppler-utils for converting pdf to image.

You do not need an X server to use jupyter notebook, you just need to copy the address and the token when you start jupyter to your web browser.

(If there is an error about not being able to import  mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.something, it is probably because there is an existing mpl_toolkits package. So remove /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mpl_toolkits.)

You also need to install latex under your Ubuntu environment: sudo apt install texlive-full, for example (or sudo apt install texlive-base texlive-publishers).

If you would like to have an X server, you can install e.g. Xming; see here.

QISKit Installation for Windows (method 3)

An alternative way to have unix-like environment is to install cygwin under Windows; see here for details in cygwin. You can install miktex in Windows in order to use latex; see here.

QISKit Installation for Ubuntu

It is exactly the same procedure (except you are already in Ubuntu). For other distributions, make sure you have proper python3, latex, and poppler. Installing qiskit and python packages using pip is exactly the same as described above.

QISKit Installation for MAC

If you use anaconda, then the installation is similar to METHOD 1 above for install QISkit. In addition, you need to install poppler: brew install poppler.

A General Method

There is a 7 min video by IBM HERE that sets up QISKit in a slightly different way.

Reading assignments on quantum computing:
Kaye’s Introduction to Quantum Computing
IBM Q beginner’s guide