Aesthetic Garden

You are given a garden of n flowers arranged in a row. Each flower has a color represented by an integer. A garden is considered aesthetic if no two adjacent flowers share the same color. Your task is to determine the minimum number of changes needed to make the garden aesthetic.

Explanation: For every pair of adjacent flowers with the same color, you must change one of them. Note that when a change is made, the new color can be any integer value that does not equal its adjacent neighbor’s color. In this problem, you can simulate this by assigning a dummy value to break the equality.

Mathematical formulation: Find the minimum count c such that for the sequence of colors \(a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_n\), after at most \(c\) modifications, \(a_i \neq a_{i+1}\) for all \(1 \leq i < n\).

inputFormat

The input is read from standard input (stdin) and consists of two lines.

• The first line contains an integer n, the number of flowers.
• The second line contains n space-separated integers representing the colors of the flowers.

outputFormat

Output a single integer to standard output (stdout) representing the minimum number of changes required to ensure that no two adjacent flowers have the same color.

6
2 2 2 3 3 4

2