> Is this just some Russian quirk or the same in the West CS courses, too? I spent months building TMs (also a lot of DFAs) and equivalents as an undergraduate

> Is this just some Russian quirk or the same in the West CS courses, too? I spent months building TMs (also a lot of DFAs) and equivalents as an undergraduate student (which was a lot of fun), and personally I always thought of a TM as a string character replacement machine. The set of alphabet symbols for a TM is of course not restricted to {0, 1}, you can also chose all UTF-8 characters if you like.