Hi All, I am not sure whether it is the right place to post this question or not. But I am doing it anyway. I came across the following problem in an online assessment recently for a company. I could come up with a brute force solution, but could not find any decent solution for the given problem. Any help (hints, concept names, algorithm hint) will be a great help.

You are given an array V of N integers having values either 0 or 1. After one operation, the values of all array elements get updated and becomes 1 if both of their neighbours have equal values previously, 0 otherwise. The elements on the first and last index of the array get updated to 0 after every operation Note: The values don't get updated during operation which means that all values get updated based on previous values of V. The only constraint that I could remember was V can have upto 10^5 elements

Ex:

Input:
V = [0,1,0,1] 
X = 2 
Output:
0