And if you want to take advantage of existing algorithms you could try convert your hash to N-ary Tree or cyclic Graph if you have loops and see if there are already existing algorithms to search for specific chains/branches. It will be challenging how you map an array and a hash to a branch of a tree, given they are ordered and un-ordered data. Perhaps sorting the hashes first. (just thinking out loud)
Edit: I took "augment" to mean "add/incorporate" (which it does) but it seems you want to modify, unless you want both (but this is not obvious from your test case). So the above is probably irrelevant.
bw, bliako
