Today brings us, at long last, the latest installment in my article series on exploration of the Lottery Problem.

In the previous article, I discussed the design decisions that were made in the greedy lottery wheel generator in order to get around the computational problems inherent in even a simple greedy generator for realistically-sized lotteries. In this article, I will walk through the mechanics of generating all tickets and matches, selecting a ticket for the wheel, and updating ticket meta-data in order to allow the next selection.

You can read the whole article here. In essence, this is a walkthrough, using text, diagrams, and pseudocode, of how exactly I went about implementing a greedy algorithm based lottery wheel generator. This article addresses my solutions to problems of time complexity, much as the previous article largely addressed the solutions to problems of space complexity.

The actual generator was implemented in, of course, C++. However this article contains no actual code, only pseudocode, so as to put emphasis on the algorithms and not the details. Besides, full details of any program can only really be understood by reading code itself, not descriptions of it with snippets. I have still not yet made available the source code to this generator, although that will be forthcoming. Hopefully I will have it cleaned up enough to be suitable for public consumption before the next article in the series is posted.

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