Maths Olympiad Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 6.0 National Olympiad Prove it Hungary

Let 0<p<10<p<1 be given. Initially we have nn coins, all of which has probability pp of landing on heads, and probability 1p1-p landing on tails (the results of the tosses are independent from each other). In each round we toss our coins and remove those that result in heads. We keep repeating this until all our coins are removed. Let knk_n denote the expected number of rounds that was needed to get rid of all the coins. Prove that there exists c>0c>0 for which the following inequality holds for all positive integers nn:

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