The most audacious intellectual performance in Grandomastery: you suddenly find yourself in front of a mock scholarly board, expected to deliver a 4–6-minute preliminary PhD defence for a thesis you have never seen before. A wildly original, cross-disciplinary topic appears (e.g., “The Semiotics of Silence in Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vent Communities”, “Quantum Entanglement as a Model for Romantic Love in 19th-Century Epistolary Novels”). You must instantly: state the research q