TABLE OF CONTENTS To a quantum mechanic, the whole universe is one god-awful big interacting wavefunction but to the rest of us, it's a world full of separate and distinguishable objects that hurt us when we kick them. At a few months of age, human children recognize objects, expect them to be permanent and move continuously, and display surprise when they aren't or don't. We associate visual, tactile, and in some cases audible, and olfactory sensations with identifiable physical things. We're hardwired to understand our environment as being composed of separable things with specific properties and locations. We understand the world in terms of what was where and when. So, one can forgive us for being disappointed that the computers and networks that form so large a part of our lives and often seem so intelligent in other respects (at least on a good day) are clueless when it comes to perceiving and recognizing all these discrete physical objects that we so easily detect and categorize. Why do we have to laboriously inform a computer database, by typing or mousing or tapping a screen, that a perfectly recognizable object has arrived at our doorstep? Why is so much human intervention needed for such a simple task?
It is to correct this deficiency of networked sensibilities that the field of automated identification (auto-ID) has arisen. Auto-ID includes any means of automating the task of identifying a physical object. To date, by far the most common means of doing so...
