Liouville property for groups and manifolds

We introduce a method to estimate the entropy of random walks on groups. We apply this method to exhibit the existence of compact manifolds with amenable fundamental groups such that the universal cover is not Liouville. We also use the criterion to prove that a finitely generated solvable group admits a symmetric measure with non-trivial Poisson boundary if and only if this group is not virtually nilpotent. This, in particular, shows that any polycyclic group admits a symmetric measure such that its boundary does not readily interprete in terms of the ambient Lie group. As another application we get a series of examples of amenable groups such that any finite entropy non-degenerate measure on them has non-trivial Poisson boundary. Since the groups in question are amenable, they do admit measures such that the corresponding random walks have trivial boundary; the above shows that such measures on these groups have infinite entropy. Mathematics Subject Classification (1991) 60B15, 60J50, 28D20, 20P05, 43A07, 60J65, 43A85, 20f16