I'm a Brit (and not a lottery player) so not fully familiar with US state scratchcard lottery game mechanics :-) The longest odds straight lottery over here is 75m to 1 which is definitely enumerable, but if you say these cards get into the billions and would crash my server then I'll believe you! Agreed that you can still generate a controlled prize distribution with random tickets generated individually rather than pregenerating all combinations - it's a bit more fiddly but perfectly doable.
All this I agree won't help if your card design is as poor as the original article was, but to address the complaint of the poster before me it's perfectly possible to randomly generate tickets while controlling the number of winning tickets - you just have to have a screening function which prevents more than your controlled number of winners making it through.
All this I agree won't help if your card design is as poor as the original article was, but to address the complaint of the poster before me it's perfectly possible to randomly generate tickets while controlling the number of winning tickets - you just have to have a screening function which prevents more than your controlled number of winners making it through.