Having gotten a couple of additional questions about the light box, let me just say a couple more things.

What you’re trying to do is describe this light box. Not any light box one might be able to build with similar components. This one behaves in a special way. It has a four way switch, it has four different states it can be in.

Also: disregard the possibility of just unplugging it. That doesn’t count as a fifth state. The state we might assume it is in when it is unplugged is not part of the behavior we’re trying to describe. If you prefer, you can think of this as an exercise in describing a plugged in light box with the characteristics given.

It’s not really a coincidence that this has been assigned as a homework problem in LX522. It’s not about language, but the things we were talking about are relevant. Think about it in light of the discussion of plurality and English nouns, for example. An English noun can be in exactly one of only two states (plural or singular), and this light box can be in exactly one of only four states (red, magenta, yellow, white).

Only four.

Not eight.

Also, in part 6, when I refer to the “descriptive generalization” from part 2, I mean the description you gave, in terms of features, of when the buzzing occurs. In part 5 you should already have discovered that it’s kind of hard to state when the buzzing occurs in one of the two models (binary features vs. privative features). Part 6 is about fixing it, changing the proposal just a little bit so that you can describe the buzzing in the model where it was a problem. That’s what I meant by “capture the generalization”: describing it simply in terms of the feature model.

It’s hard to write hints and not just give away what I had in mind, but maybe this will help if you’re feeling stuck on it.