Let us take the following example of patent claims:

• claim 1
• claim 2 -- depending on claim 1
• claim 3 -- depending on claim 1 or 2
• claim 4 -- depending on claim 1
• claim 5 -- depending on claim 2
• claim 6 -- depending on one of claims 1 to 5
• claim 7 -- depending on claim 2 or 5
• claim 8 -- depending on claim 3 or 4

where claim 2 to 8 are subclaims of claim 1.

How many combinations of claims (and their features) are possible?

Solution:

• combination 1: claim 1 (this is actually not really a combination of claims but let us count it as starting point)
• combination 2: claim 1 + claim 2
• combination 3: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 3
• combination 4: claim 1 + claim 3
• combination 5: claim 1 + claim 4
• combination 6: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 5
• combination 7: claim 1 + claim 6
• combination 8: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 6
• combination 9: claim 1 + claim 3 + claim 6
• combination 10: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 3 + claim 6
• combination 11: claim 1 + claim 4 + claim 6
• combination 12: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 5 + claim 6
• combination 13: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 7
• combination 14: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 5 + claim 7
• combination 15: claim 1 + claim 2 + claim 3 + claim 8
• combination 16: claim 1 + claim 3 + claim 8
• combination 17: claim 1 + claim 4 + claim 8

There are 17 combinations.

The aim of this script is to compute the number of combinations based on the list of claims.

Let us take a look again at the example above.

Following lines define the dependency of the claims:

claim = [[1], [1], [1,2], [1], [2], [1,2,3,4,5], [2,5], [3,4]]

Claim 1 ("[1]") only depends on itself. Claim 2 ("[1]") depends on claim 1. Claim 3 ("[1,2]") depends on claim 1 and 2. And so on.

Put this in the function "num_combinations()":

num_combinations(claim)

Output:

Total combinations: 17