Sometimes there is a trade off in designing these levels. When players can "brute force" the solution in certain levels, they can proceed without taking away the lesson they were supposed to. Since there is only 16 permutations for the answer of the first level, having to select the combination is "brute force protection". But its obviously also not good if it turns more experienced players off
It took me a second to realize what the heck it was trying to ask me to do. It was not immediately obvious that I had to trigger the inputs to get the various states, and then answer the query.