So I am looking for a good way to end the conversation and show the user their results.

Right now, when the bot is out of questions in all topics, it just keeps responding “I don’t know what to say”. How do I direct it to a particular response that ends the conversation logically like “OK, thanks for chatting”?

I was thinking I could just check if all of the questions in all topics except for the system topics are used up, and if yes, reuse my end-of-conversation response. I also have this feature that when a user says something like “I don’t know”, I don’t enter that topic again and save a variable like $current_topic_pop = 1, so that I know that all of the questions may not be used up in that particular topic, but that’s because it’s been popped. So I need to take that into account.

Any advice on how to end a chat correctly? Thank you!

One may or may not exhaust a topic of questions. If the user asks the question again, do you want it used up or not?  You obviously CAN exhaust the flow of a topic, the gambits, and there is a function to ask if the last gambit of a topic has been used up. If you HAVE erased all questions in a topic, then it doesnt really matter that you enter the topic because it will not react. SO it becomes merely an efficiency question and CS is fast enough for that to be irrelevant.

Thank you for the reply, Bruce!

OK, I see what you mean. Is there a way to know if a topic has been entered at all at least once regardless of how many responses are used up?

Again, depends on what you actually want.  You can find out if the first gambit has been used.
In postprocess you can retrieve topic name of topic generating response and save a mark against it in some manner.
And if the topic is not SYSTEM or NOSTAY then it will be %topic at the start of the next volley