In this paper, I propose an approach to architectures which makes precise exactly what it means for an agent to 'have' an architecture, and allows us to establish properties of an agent expressed in terms of its architectural description. Using this approach, it is possible to verify whether two different agent programs really have the same architecture or the same properties, allowing a more precise comparison of architectures and the agent programs which implement them. I illustrate the

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... ch with a number of examples which show both how to establish qualitative and quantitative properties of architectures and agent programs, and how to establish whether a particular agent has a particular architecture. I focus on architectures of software agents, however a similar approach can be applied to robots and other kinds of intelligent systems. * This paper is a revised an extended version of a paper presented at the 2007 AAAI Workshop on Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence .