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Has there been any serious quantitative research into the additive or multiplicative effect of tools on effective intellectual horsepower to solve hard problems?

For instance, if I put two groups of mathematicians in two different rooms and lock them up for three years, but one group has access to the internet and the other doesn't, how much more progress will they make on the same open problem?

What if I give both groups internet access but only one group gets to use modern search engines?

What about finer gradations of the same idea? Is a research team confined to using only Google to search smarter or dumber than a team that must only use Bing.

I'm wondering about how much IQ actually matters compared to tools. After reading Sapiens (which I highly suggest), I don't think the principle machinery for solving problems exists in our heads and hasn't probably since the middle ages, if not before.

Out of date : "As for practice, I believe practice allows one to live to their cognitive potential – but not exceed it. With a lot of practice, a person with an IQ of 130 can become a decent physicist, but not someone with an IQ of 90."

It makes the common assumption which was used in the 19th and early 20th century that "IQ" was a fixed quantity. Versus Flynn's observation [1] that in every country they surveyed people's IQ increased over time.

More modern thinkers recognize cognitive impairment as a function of disease or damage, but cognitive ability is not a fixed scale.

[1] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/flynn1998a.pd...

Hmm, but the Flynn effect is endogenous, meaning that while IQs may be higher, IQ scores don't rise throughout the persons's life to suggest exogenous factors, only over many generations of testing. So the quote about the physicist is true, but in future generations, assuming the Flynn Effect holds, we may have more people with the cognitive capacity to become physicists.