Could Ms. Pac-Man Train the Next Generation of Military Drones?

Thirty-five years ago, while Martin Amis was writing “Money,” one of the novels that defined the nineteen-eighties, he admitted to a distracting dalliance with another contemporary icon. “I have spent weeks in a PacMan-fed stupor, unwilling and unable to think about anything else,” he wrote in “Invasion of the Space Invaders,” his “addict’s guide” to the nascent arcade. Amis was not alone in his obsession. The Japanese-made game, in which players guide an auto-munching yellow head through a Daedalian maze, consuming a trail of pellets while fleeing four candy-tone ghosts, earned more than a billion dollars in quarters in its first year, surpassing the highest-grossing “Star Wars” film at the time. Pac-Man towered, Amis wrote, over “a vast garbage dump of rocky romances and wrecked careers.” He claimed to know a young actress with a case of Pac-Man hand so severe that her index finger resembled a piece of liver.